ICARUS
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: Jimmy wakes up alive and whole at 11:30 AM on Tuesday the First, and wakes up, and wakes up... (A groundhog Day Loop committed to the idea of breaking Jimmy down to his most basic components)


_"—I don't like myself much."_

[CLICK]

Jimmy wakes with a gasp that scrapes his lungs raw. He croaks through a cough like a lightning strike in the desert, hot sand and white fire, tears beading at the corners of his eyes as his hands come up to claw frantically at his chest. Fabric twists and creaks under his nails. It's—whole—?

He's fine?

It is 11:30 AM on Tuesday the First, and Jimmy Eureeds is in his own bedroom, whole and alive and breathing with heavy, raw breaths. As he picks up his clock and squints blearily at the red digital letters, fingers shaking, something deafening crashes to the floor of the kitchen below him.

The square darkness of a mallet suspended against a white ceiling, a freeze frame in the shape of _pain_—the taste of his own teeth—he has seen his own heart beating under his ribs and it is the same tender pleading matter—

"H, holy shit," Jimmy says, wiping spit from the corner of his mouth. "I've never had a nightmare like…"

The pin-up on his ceiling gives him her usually sly smile, oblivious to his panic.

Down in the kitchen his dad howls at something or someone. Jimmy screws up his face in a disappointed scowl. No point in trying to sleep in, with that starting up. He throws off the covers and takes a second to fight off the dizziness, elbows planted on his thighs, and then pulls off his oversized night shirt.

"Good morning Elvira, Hacksaw," he tells his fish, as the force of his shirt hits the desk chair and spins it around. He checks the fish food canister, rattling it close to his ear. That's weird. He could swear he finished it off yesterday, but there's still some in here. He distinctly remembers… did he dream that?

Well, he's not one to look a gift fish in the teeth! Once this is gone, he's not sure how he's gonna get the money for the next one. He's burned up most of his bus fare lately chasing after—

Cold fucking eyes _black_ eyes merciless _I don't like myself much_

Jimmy clutches a hand to his naked chest, disoriented. He's had some fucked up dreams in his time but he's never seen his own _organs_ before. That's probably not really what they look like. Feels way real, though.

Hacksaw and Elvira gulp up the fishfood as Jimmy goes about getting ready for the day. He does his hair, pops in his earrings, smudges on khol straight from the tin with his thumb. Forget the toothbrush, he's not in the mood for that. His hand hovers over the shirt he really wants to wear—top of the pile on the floor of his small closet—it's not clean, but then, nothing he owns is. Laundromats cost money he'd rather spend on other stuff and the washing machine downstairs hasn't worked since his mother left. He's half convinced she took one of the parts with her just to stick it to them. The hell knows what she did with it. Maybe she ate it, the psycho bitch.

His mother is his hero. She got out of this rat hole life while she could.

With his shirt on, Jimmy leans up and kisses each of his posters. "Good morning, David, Siouxsie," he says, and then lingering over the red lips of the Rocky Horror poster, "Good morning Tim~"

Just as he's coming down the stairs, hand on the chewed up banister, a can of beer crashes and splatters on the wall just above his head and he skitters back, landing on his ass as the sloshing can thump-thump-thumps down to the landing.

"Jesus Christ, Dad," he says, "what was that for?"

Somewhere in the ratty darkness below him, his dad swears incoherently.

"Two days in a fucking row," Jimmy mutters. "You're gonna strip the wallpaper at this rate." He slides the rest of the way down the steps just in case his dad decides to give what is clearly becoming his favorite pastime a second try.

"Where're _you _going," James Sr. demands. "You deadbeat little leech, when're you gonna do something about this shit shack?"

"It's _your_ shit shack," Jimmy says, kicking a pizza box out of his path. He stays hunched, moving like a bug or an army guy from one end of the landing to the other. "You do something about it."

"I put a roof over your ungrateful little head—" his dad says, starting to get real puffed up, "—I paid your bills since the day you were born—"

"Yeah, that's me, only toddler on the block driving a fucking Lamborghini."

"I put my life on hold for this family and this is the thanks I get," James Sr. says, "dead wife in an alley in Toronto somewhere and a son who sucks dick."

His footsteps tromping away heavily in the dark, fading along with his litany of complaints.

As Jimmy kicks his way through the darkness, he hooks his boot under the bottom of the arm chair and flips it over backwards, spilling whatever was in the cupholder all over the back cushion. "She ain't dead," he mutters, and throws the front door open in front of him.

Every day, he swears, every day the same goddamn thing.

Once he's out in the fresh air and the sunshine (look, not to screw up his goth cred, but he'll take the light of the hideous Day Star over the murk of that house any day) his mood takes itself a deep breath and starts to even out. He shakes the dust off his clothes and hits the road.

It's a nice day. He could go to the record store again. When Fish is working there, sometimes he'll get so high he'll let Jimmy listen to his private records. Yesterday he—or no, that was the dream, he thinks, because what he remembers is all wrapped up in that neighborhood, the dirt and concrete and yellowed wood in the boarded-over windows.

And the taste of his own teeth.

Okay, so he'll visit the record shop. Then he'll finish wiring the mini-kiln in the garage and test out the temperature on some of his scrap metal, he's got a pile of it and he'd really like to find a way to use that before he goes scrapping for leaf spring in the junkyard again. Maybe he'll even get the handle for the scimitar finished. He feels productive. He feels like today is going to be a good day.

And then the bus comes sailing through the crosswalk, nearly clipping him as he throws himself across the curb. Concrete grit grinds into his hands, splayed on the curb below him, as the bus comes to a rusty halt beside the bus stop a few dozen feet away. His palms burn. His jaw clenches. He'll kill that motherfucker, he'll rip him guts to gizzard and burn his stupid bus down to the tires, he'll… he… he's been here before, hasn't he?

The hot pain in his palms, the sound of the bus's screeching brakes, the exact glitter of sand mixed into the concrete, he's seen this before. How has he seen…

And if he got up and walked up to the bus door and climbed inside and rode it until the last stop, it would take him to a quiet little neighborhood in the middle of a ruined suburb he's circled a hundred times, a place he's never been able to find his way into before, and the bus driver will say, _what the fuck_—

Jimmy shakes himself, all his seething vengeance dissolved under the force of déjà vu. He climbs up from the ground and gets into the bus, shoulders hunched, bounced between the unloading passengers as they shove past him. He fishes out a couple of quarters and climbs onboard, looking from face to face with a growing nausea. There's a woman with a huge auburn perm, staring disapprovingly at his eye shadow. A potbellied man in an open janitor's uniform is digging food out of his teeth with the cap the pen in his breast pocket. There's a lump of freshly chewed pink gum glistening on the floor of the cab. Every insipid and disgusting detail as familiar as the exact glitter of sand in the concrete.

He rides the bus, too dazed to worry about the gum or the pen or the woman smacking her lips on a greasy sandwich, down to the Fifth and Pearl stop, where he unloads like a crate tumbling off the back of a truck. There's a bum on the corner with a sign that says—he doesn't even have to read it, but he does—_fuk u stingy bitches_. When he walks past, the old man takes a drunken swing at his leg, which only misses because Jimmy skirts out of the way a moment sooner than he did—than he did before—

He pushes into the record shop, sweating, to the tune of the doorbell. Fish looks up from his magazine, licks his snakebites like a nervous animal and says, "Don't stand in the doorway man, there's spooks out there."

_There's spooks out there _oh yeah what is it this time?_ c_oupl'a guys in sunglasses on the corner I _know_ they know I know __Fish what the fuck are you on

"The uh," Jimmy says, "the guys in sunglasses?"

Fish twitches, eyes darting across the room. "You saw 'em too?"

Jimmy shakes his head. "No, Jesus man, there's nobody out there but the usual piss ants. You gotta stop smoking that shit, it makes you incomprehensible."

"Gotta keep my edge on," Fish says, with a side eye that can't quite settle on any one target. "They're tapping the phones. They'll tap yours too, when they see you hanging around."

Jimmy's hand grips his forehead, fingertips squeezing his sweaty skin and slipping. It's no good asking Fish if he was doing this yesterday too, the guy can barely remember his own name most days. Jimmy doesn't actually _know_ his name, unless it really is Fish, which he doubts.

Look, Jimmy's got a history of having some fucked _up_ dreams, and this wouldn't be the first time his memory of his real life got all mixed up in the nightmare shit. It wasn't that long ago that he realized the scar on his wrist actually corresponded with a persistent dream he'd been having about his first grade teacher and a metal-edged ruler. But this is so mixed up he doesn't know how to unmix it, and the only thing he can think is what if it's _true_, what if he can go to that place in real life and knock on that door for real?

"Don't hurl on my floor," Fish's distant voice says. "I gotta clean that."

"I," Jimmy says, and realizes he's kneeling on the floor, under the record display. "I gotta go man."

There's only one way to know for sure, right?

He waits at the bus stop for a long time, staring into nothing. If it's all true, then something or someone must _want_ him to follow the steps. It must be _leading _him to Nny, trying to unite them at last. The rightful order pulling them together the way it was meant to be. Cosmic intervention. Okay so the dream ended up in a less than ideal place, but hey, why worry about that when he knows things can't possibly go that way for _real_. It just wouldn't make any sense. They're soulmates, destined compatriots, lone visionaries in a world of idolaters and idiots.

He doesn't notice the goofy smile on his lips until the soccer mom looking bitch in the 300$ sneakers trots past and says, "Druggie freak."

Well he doesn't remember _that _happening before. His smile falters and drops. Does he have time to grab her by the ponytail and drag her into an alley? He chews his lip. After that dream this morning he's got this morbid urge to see a living heart beating in a living ribcage, and that's not normally how he operates. He's more of a _dissector_ than a vivisector.

No, he decides, not right now. Finding Nny is much more important than scratching a passing itch.

A while after the soccer bitch disappears into the parking garage the bus laboriously pulls up and allows him to waste his last dollar on this trip out to the end of the line. He is holding his breath, crossing his fingers; he is daring to hope.

"What the fuck," the bus driver says, twenty minutes later, slowing as the city road winds down into an unmarked singlewide street. Jimmy clutches the overhead handle, barely believing his eyes. The bare dirt and cracking asphalt, the gnarled houses, trash in the yards—every bit of it exactly like he remembers.

"You can let me off here," he manages, already on his feet.

By the time the bus is gone he's standing on the doorstep, knocking firmly on the door. This is _it_, this is the place, no doubt about it. In his dream—vision?—he remembers going from door to door through the neighborhood, knocking on doors, until the little squeaky kid in the neighboring house directed him at last to here, his final… his final…

_Resting Place _echoes at the back of his head like an cry in a stone basement, uncomfortably weighing down his good mood. The door creaks open.

"Hey!" he says, surging up on the balls of his feet, not quite able to hold himself back.

In the shadow of the doorway, Nny looks him up and down. It was night in the dream, but it's sunny midday now, and looking down at him Jimmy can see that every detail of him is just like it was— his haircut, even the washed out brown of his skin, and that, that's what makes Jimmy hesitate.

"I thought you'd be paler than you…are…" he says, stumbling over words he remembers even as he says them.

"And who the hell are you?" Nny says.

Jimmy shakes his head. The pitch, he's just got to do the pitch. The rest of it he can wing, he just needs to stick to the _pitch._

"You don't know me, but you'll want to!" he says. "We have a lot in common you and I! I've wanted to talk to you for so long! My name's Jimmy, but you can call—" the square head of a mallet against the white ceiling, blood, the tender pump of flesh, "—um, you can call me 'Mmy,' like…"

Nny is looking at him, and the look isn't exactly a… _welcoming look_. He's fucking up the pitch, Jesus Christ, he's gotta save this before it gets out of hand.

"Hey," he says, salvaging his smile, "you gonna invite me in?"

"Oh, forgive my lack of manners," Nny says, retreating into the dark, "do come in."

Jimmy breathes a sigh of relief and strolls inside. The smell is familiar, crumbling plaster and iron and something as black and musty as the underside of a grave. His heart gives a nervous thump as he breathes it in.

"I've been following you," Jimmy says, "I saw you a few months back at the Taco Hell across from the CD Cesspool—you just had this look on your face, you looked so interesting. It wasn't easy, 'cause you hardly ever stay in one place long enough to catch, but I've seen your work around town and I just gotta say, I'm a _huge _fan."

"You're a _fan?" _Nny says. "A fan of _what?"_

"Of what you _do_," Jimmy says, leaning in, "I _know_ what you _do_. The first time I saw it I knew I had to meet you. You're something of a role model of mine. The Plato to my Socrates, the Da Vinci to my Salai! Your art is a beacon in the grime of this fucking _awful_ world, a redemptive power—"

"Excuse me," Nny says, "Mister… Jimmy-person. I think you have the wrong house."

"No no no no _look,"_ Jimmy says, getting more worked up with each step back Nny takes, "you work with the living canvas, whose ephemeral beauty is only realized in the tiny moment at which life has been truly extinguished. I've taken it upon myself to become something of an apprentice to you. I'm even—" he fumbles for his case, "I'm making my own tools to work with! I've been practicing, following in your footsteps. I've modeled every execution you've left behind—actually I think I've improved on them, just wait until you see what I've come up with—"

He lays out his case and spreads out his tools while he tells Nny all about the face he took off Mrs. Estragon's head, and the girl in the alley that looked like Didi Cooper, and he gets as far as that one time at the mall with the coat hanger when he looks up and realizes Nny is halfway down the basement steps. "Hey!" he says, lunging to his feet, "where are you—"

He skids to a stop at the edge of the doorway. Déjà vu nauseates him, the smell of rot nauseates him, the sharp descent of the stairs down to that hard floor nauseates him. None of this is going right.

"Wait," he says, grabbing the doorframe with both hands, leaning over the edge of the step, "you can't leave yet! I'm not done, I'm not—you'll really like me once you get to know me! I promise! Come back!"

It's a silver glint in the darkness, like a star through the night, and it catches him in the shoulder with a scream of steel through muscle. He topples forward. And he keeps toppling. He hits the floor with a ringing head, the sound of Nny's monologue buzzing in his ears.

How is—but this isn't supposed to happen, this part isn't supposed to happen! Isn't he _entitled _to his place at Johnny's side, after all he's done? After all his hard work, his practice, his _contributions_—isn't he entitled to the same kind of smile the Woman got, the kind of warmth, when out of all the people on this miserable planet it's only Jimmy who could ever hope to understand—

"This isn't right," he says, curling onto his side. "You're not _listening _ to me."

He sees the new boots as they come across the floor, one thoughtful step at a time. They stop just in front of his nose.

"On the contrary," Nny says, somewhere high above his silver-edges boots. "It's you who isn't listening. You want a teacher? Let me teach you a few things."

Steel. Flesh. Teeth. It all comes back with a dreamy specificity, stroke by stroke, only this time the shock is wearing off faster. Last time he barely felt any of it, not until the last brutal crunch—

The frayed edges of his ragged chest peel back to reveal his thumping, pink heart—

He looks up at the dark flat of the mallet, suspended against the white ceiling. He's not as scared this time, is the weird thing. Out of all the things that should be hurting him, it's his untouched heart that is most wounded, somehow.

The mallet comes down—

[CLICK]

Jimmy wakes up breathing hard.

It is 11:30 AM on Tuesday the First, and Jimmy Eureeds is in his own bedroom, whole and alive. The red digital letters insist that this is the case. Jimmy rolls out of bed and hits the floor, palming hard at his shoulder, where he can still feel the hot slice of the kitchen knife. He can _feel_ it. The floor is gritty with dirt against his cheek because he hasn't swept in here since he was fourteen and his shoulder is not the only thing screaming, there's a line of fire down his chest as well.

Okay, first of all, what the _fuck._

Down in the kitchen his dad howls at something or someone.

Second of all whAT THE FUCK.

After a second of ringing bewilderment, Jimmy levers himself up and sits, legs crossed, in the tangle of his bedsheets.

In a whip and flutter of fabric, Jimmy rips off his shirt and passes his hands down his chest, prodding at the unbroken skin. There's a faint scar, he thinks, right down the middle, like a pearlescent autopsy incision. That wasn't there before. Under his fishbelly pale skin all his ribs are whole, their faint bars visible below his clavicle with each outward breath.

He sits there for a long time, deaf to his dad's shouting, his forehead in his hand. That was real. Either that _was_ real or he's gone completely batshit and while he's not saying he_ couldn't _take a hard left off crazy canyon, it's just like… not gonna do him any good to pretend like he didn't just live what he knows he just lived. Jimmy has never been one to let metaphysical quandaries slow him down. His shoulder gives a hard pang.

So that happened.

He remembers more of it now, in the places where it doubled up, or the shock wasn't as heavy the second time. That's what the first time was, he figures, pure numb shock. It's coming back more clearly now.

Jimmy sways to his feet, and in due course finds himself at the mirror. What went _wrong?_

He pokes at his face, trying to see what Johnny saw. Okay so he's not the _prettiest_ thing on two feet, but he doesn't have a whole lot of control over that. What he does have control over is his _pitch_. His pitch, his confidence, and his resume.

"Be a better judge of character," he says to his reflection, pushing at the corner of his eye.

So what, Johnny doesn't _want _him to like him? It's some kind of tortured artist thing, it's got to be. How else do you explain it? Like Jimmy could just live in a world with Johnny and not want to know him, like he could just see Johnny and not love—

Jimmy shakes his head. He'll take a shower. It's been a couple days since he did that, although technically from the world's perspective it's all been the same day. Whatever. He needs to clear his head.

The pipes rattle, steam crawls up from the tub smelling of ancient shampoo and insecticide. Jimmy slides back the curtain and slips under the stream, only half-seeing. A jumble of memories are playing themselves behind his eyes, the lecture coming back to him one snarl at a time. He's reaching for the soap when he remembers—

_Oh look, an orifice_

The bar slips out of his hand. His skin prickles with goosebumps, his stomach twists, the sick fascination rips through him like a, like,

_How do you like being fucked with steel?_

Jimmy plants his palms against the wall. Holy shit, it turns out getting naked was a _terrible_ idea. It's bad enough to feel what's happening against his thigh, he doesn't need to _see_ it too. It shouldn't be hot, it _shouldn't be_, he can taste the fear of that moment on his tongue like stomach acid, his whole body is still throbbing with pain, it wasn't good and he didn't like it. It was terrible. And still, Johnny was inside him. That's the closest he's been to someone since—

Jimmy looks up. The dingy grout looks back at him. _Oh_, oh he sees what the problem here is. It's the _girl._

He slams the shower off and blows through his room like a whirlwind, upsetting piles of clothes and getting water all over everything. _That's_ where the whole pitch went wrong!

On the stairs he leaps down to the landing in such a rush that the beer can hits the wall well above his head, and he doesn't stop running until he hits the bus stop.

In a yellow neighborhood many minutes later, in the smoggy wake of the city bus, Jimmy thumps the door hard until it swings open under him with an irritated _"What?"_

"Okay look," Jimmy says, and pushes past Nny.

Inside the air reeks of the same graveyard decay, sweet and damp and cold, and the first breath of it is almost enough to knock the wind out of his sails. It smells like death. It smells like _his_ death.

"I thought you'd be _pleased_," he says, and drops his case onto the bare floorboards. "I mean, I took initiative! I made the punishment fit the crime, I did my research, I executed the kill—are you mad because I did it myself instead of using a jar of rats? I didn't want to say this so early on, but I'm _kind _of a little afraid of rats and I really don't want to try and get them into a jar. They have these little teeth? I respect your vision! I'm sorry if it seemed like some kind of a crude knock off!"

He turns on his heel, palms outstretched, and finds Nny squinting at him.

"Excuse me," Nny says, delicately, and points at the open door, "this is number 777. The crack house is two blocks over."

"I'm not looking for _crack_," Jimmy says, crossing his arms. "I'm—oh, shit, you don't remember me. Oh," he takes a deep breath. "This is going to be _such_ a pain in the ass."

Nny pushes off the wall, hands in pockets. "Okay, well, wherever you're going you should get there before I think of some other use for you. I have a full day of envying insects penciled in, and I really hate to get behind schedule."

"No wait-!"

Jimmy dashes after him and catches him by the arm, the whole circumference of it fitting easily inside his palm. Johnny freezes.

"I'm a fan, see?" Jimmy says, gesturing down the length of his noodle boy shirt. "I'm a student! I've been trying to—to kill the way you kill, with poetry! Precision! Some witty repartee!"

Johnny looks down at the place where Jimmy is holding him. Some growing familiarity with Johnny's Looks is sounding warning bells in the back of his head, trying to get his attention, but he hasn't got _time_ for that, he's in the middle of something.

"So I killed this girl, right?" he says, talking fast. "She looked like this chick I used to know, Didi, this bitch who used to laugh at me—_you_ know what it's like, Johnny, _you_ know what I mean—so I followed her, I saw her meeting up with her boyfriend and getting shitfaced in bars and going home with drunk fuckheads and she was a _slut_, okay, she was a sad little person who filled her sad little life with dick so I—"

Johnny wrenches his arm free. He's got that look, that look Jimmy knows two times over, but the thing is Jimmy can't _stop_, not when he's so close to getting it right.

The truth is, Jimmy isn't much of a vivisector. He already said that. Getting people to hold still before you kill them is _hard_. He doesn't like the squirming. It's not like he chickens out, he wants to do it _right_, but—there's all kinds of reasons he shouldn't get elbow deep in torture right now, okay? He doesn't have a secure location like Johnny does, for one thing. It would be suicidal.

So he killed her and he got off and it was supposed to be a funny middle finger to her dumb corpse and he's not sure why _this_ is the sticking point.

"That's what you always do isn't it?" Jimmy says. "Ironic punishments? I thought you'd _laugh_, I thought we could _bond_ over it."

"_Bond_?" Johnny hisses.

Jimmy licks his lip. "Uh. Yeah. Bond."

With his head of steam thoroughly blown, Jimmy realizes all at once that he's made a fatal series of errors. Johnny's pupils are pinpricks of black in his bulging eyes.

"You thought that _I_," Johnny says, "would bond with _you,_ over your masturbatory, self-congratulatory, auto-degradation of primitive dick-worship? Am I a fucking _chimpanzee_?"

The movement was so fast it glittered, it burned up like a shot through the atmosphere, the knife in his hand, the slice through the air. Jimmy staggers back, trash slides under his heel, and he hits the floor in a sprawl.

"Maybe I do know you!" Johnny says. "You certainly came through the door like you knew me! There's a lot of things I can't remember! If my life was filled with things half as putrescent as you, no wonder I let it rot out of me."

He's super gonna die here.

"But you—" he says, "—the way you talk about pretty girls—I know you, I've seen it-"

"I don't want to _fuck _them, you revolting atavism."

Jimmy touches his gashed chest blindly, fingers coming back slick and hot with blood. It burns terribly. If he looks down, he knows he'll see ribs through the opening. "You wanna hurt 'em, though," he says. "Cause they're pretty, and they hate you."

For half a second, there's complex geometry moving across Johnny's face. His eye twitches. After a moment, he lifts his short knife to Jimmy's throat. The tip of it stings.

"I want to hurt a lot of people," he says. "Right now, I dearly want to hurt you."

Jimmy swallows thickly. His throat bobs under the knifepoint. "I don't get it. A dick or a jar full of rats, what's the difference?"

There's something about the black pinpricks of Johnny's pupils. The merciless cold of something more winter than human, more storm than animal. For the first time, Jimmy is not afraid of the knife or the blood loss or the missed opportunity—for the first time, Jimmy is afraid of _Johnny._

"The difference," Johnny says, "is that when I hurt someone, I make it clean."

Johnny grips him by the hair. The blade rips through him, a hot line from ear to ear, and Jimmy burbles blood. His vision swims, but the hand threaded through his hair won't let him topple forward.

"Well I guess clean isn't the right word," Johnny says to himself, as if the thought just occurred to him. "I did spend ages drilling that one guy, really botched that job. But you see what I mean, don't you? I keep myself out of it. The satisfaction I seek is not of the flesh but the soul."

Jimmy's chest is hot and cold with blood pouring and cooling down his front. Johnny's grip twists him, moves his face back and forth as if Johnny is holding him to the light, inspecting him.

"I don't say this out of pity for the vermin," he says, "but if I were to hurt someone that way, it would hurt me too."

Jimmy's vision is swallowed with black.

[CLICK]

Jimmy rolls over and throws up onto the floor of his bedroom.

It is 11:30 AM on Tuesday the First, and Jimmy Eureeds is in his own bedroom, whole and alive and wiping acidic spit from his cheek with the back of one hand. His throat feels like he's been force-fed glass shards, and he's not sure if it's the puke or the third death he's somehow lived to tell about.

The liquid on the floor is mostly just liquid. He can't remember the last time he'd eaten, after all these days that just seem to start back at zero no matter what. The fish, he remembers. He's got to feed the fish.

He stumbles up from bed and shakes out the canister, nearly upending the whole thing as he struggles to get the cap off. Maybe he should… go downstairs and have some food. Except there's his stupid dad howling at the ceiling again, like clockwork, and he knows he's not gonna be able to sit in peace long enough to eat anything. Maybe it's for the best, this way when Johnny opens him up again there won't be—

He feels a little green again. The table with the tank on it shakes as he steadies himself on the edge.

"So I was right," he tells Elvira, who is giving him a concerned look with her enormous goldfish eyes, "but boy I wish I wasn't."

Elvira loses interest and wiggles away into the plastic cathedral arch.

He feels green and confused and hurt, and—guilty, which is a feeling that takes several minutes to identify on account of it being something he doesn't feel often.

"But I can't _undo _it," he tells the fish, "I don't even know how I'm getting back to this morning, I can't… change anything I've already done."

The fish have nothing to contribute on the subject. Jimmy sighs. He wishes there were someone he could talk with about this, but normally when he needs to talk about something important he just imagines that he's talking to Johnny and right _now_, well, that seems a little… overwhelming. He's three for three on having his guts ripped open, and he's no closer to getting it right. It's enough to make a guy a little self-conscious.

He's thinking about what Johnny said, about hurt.

Absentmindedly, Jimmy gives each of his posters their finger-tip kiss. Maybe he's been missing the most essential part of what Johnny is _about_, here. It's not just that they share _the work_, it's that they are both products of a careless casual cruelty, a series of opened and reopened wounds that cannot heal and so they go gangrenous and ooze their infection. The work is only a bloom from that gruesome soil, the white cap of a mushroom in a living pulsing swamp.

Out on the curbside, he fishes out a couple of quarters and climbs onboard the bus, after narrowly avoiding being clipped for the fourth time. It's all there just like clockwork, like a musical toy rewound to play its stupid pantomime out again and again. There's the disapproving woman with a huge auburn perm, the potbellied man in an open janitor's uniform, the lump of freshly chewed pink gum glistening on the floor of the cab. Each disgusting detail is as perfect as if it was there by design, tenderly crafted by a God who loves mediocre depressing bullshit and built this whole planet as a shrine to it. The stairs, the bus, the neighborhood—Jimmy bears with the whole repetitive tedium, but his mind is on other things.

He's not sure exactly why it would hurt Nny to do something like what Jimmy did, but he understands hurt itself.

The house waits for him like the still water above a predator buried in the sand, only the flash of a gulping maw away from swallowing him whole. He knocks on the door, rocking on his heels, passing his case from hand to hand, until Nny pulls the door back the same as before, squinting a little bit at the sunlight.

"Hey," he says, "I'm Jimmy, but you can call me Mmy, or the Darkness, or something else cool if you think of it. Can I come in?"

"…No," Johnny says, eyes narrow.

"Great," Jimmy says, and walks through the door.

The mausoleum dimness, the iron and graveyard shadow, the smell clicks into place the moment he breathes in to start his pitch. It's sour tasting on his tongue, but he soldiers on. He goes ahead and sets his case down on the floor, popping it open at his feet.

"I've been following you," he says, cutting right to the chase, "for a couple months now. You and me, we have a lot in common, and I don't just mean what we _do."_

"I don't follow," Johnny says. His fingers are beating a tattoo against his arm.

"I know what you do, Johnny," he says. He settles onto his knees as he sorts through the case. "I've seen the way you take the wasted flesh of the world and carve it into something ephemeral, making meaning out of meaningless garbage. You take something that was a travesty and bring beauty out of it!"

"Beauty," Johnny repeats. "You think what I do is _beautiful_."

"Sure!" Jimmy says, straining upward now, on his hands and knees, to eager to stay focused on the case. "What's a worse sin than a wasted life? These masses of meat live for nothing, but you make them _die_ for something. Twenty or forty years of spewing poison and sewage, and then in your hands they become art. You _redeem_ them. That's beautiful."

"You certainly seem to have a lot of opinions about something you don't understand," Johnny says. "Can you leave now? You're making me feel somewhat nauseas."

"No, no hold on!" Jimmy says, and lunges to his feet, stumbling over his case. Okay, appealing to aesthetics isn't working. He can salvage this. Jimmy touches his chest, fingertips pressing the invisible line down the center of his rib cage. "I _do_ understand."

Johnny gives him a very wary look up and down.

Jimmy opens his arms. "No one else could understand you like I do," he says, "I know what you are, what you're about, how you _feel._ I was always the 'weirdo' too, in school, all of that stuff, you know? I used to sit up for hours thinking about what I'd do to get even, how to hit them where it hurt. It's not enough just to erase the flaws from this species, right? You need to teach them a _lesson_, make them _suffer_. Crush them under your boot until the sickness oozes out of them like lemon juice, zesty fresh!"

"And what makes you think you know anything about me?" Johnny says.

"You're the same as me," Jimmy says. "Everywhere you go, people laugh at you like they think you're the fucking circus, like you exist for their entertainment. Nothing you do is good enough for anyone! You're too thin or you're too ugly or you're not fast enough to keep up, and they see you cry and they know they can _make you_ cry and so they _do_, and no matter how bad it hurts it's never anything but another Tuesday for them."

Jimmy bends down and fumbles in his case for one of his tools. "Don't they forget fast! It takes a lifetime to live down the kind of hurt they'll forget the second they look away. I looked up my old first grade teacher, you know, on account of how a week hasn't gone by that I didn't think about what she did to me—and the funny part is she didn't even remember me!"

He comes up with the modified paring knife, rolling it between his fingers so that it flashes in the moldy light.

"You shoulda seen her face when I took it off," he says, "you'd be proud of me, I know it. She used to take me up and whack me with that stupid ruler whenever I asked too many questions about Columbus or whatever. I remember how my knuckles used to bleed. _Don't be a smartass,_ she was always saying, the old bitch just about flayed me. You ever seen those slap bracelets? You know they won't sell 'em anymore, since some kid sliced his wrist open with one. I'd like to show that kid what you can do with an edged ruler."

The old dream comes bobbing to the surface, the blood dripping down his wrist as he faintly asks to be dismissed to see the nurse, the snickering—why do they snicker when it could just as easily be them tomorrow? But maybe that's why, because it _could_ be, but it _won't_ be, just as long as Little Jimmy Eureeds keeps saying the wrong thing at the wrong damn time. The blood plopped and pooled on his desk, flat red marks like a red office stamp. It's fine. Jimmy smiles.

"Here," he says, holding out the paring knife. "Take a look! I've been making my own stuff, I bet I could even make you better stuff than what you're working with right now!"

After a too-long moment, Nny pinches the knife tip between his fingers and takes it back. He examines it delicately, mouth a thin line.

"And there was the, uh, the girl that looked like Didi Cooper," Jimmy says, hedging around the part that makes him feel uneasy, "I thought it _was_ her at first, no fuckin' surprise if she didn't remember _me_, I thought. I guess it really wasn't her though, 'cause I saw her take this guy home once and he didn't call her Didi, but anyway, I figured what's the difference? Even if she ain't done anything to me yet, she's done _something_. They all have."

"Please stop telling me about this," Johnny says, tightening his fist around the handle of the knife.

The need to justify himself bubbles up in Jimmy's gut, bitter and acidic as the vomit he mopped up from his bedroom floor. He's sure he can make Johnny understand, only… only…

That acid feeling is definitely guilt, and he doesn't like it.

"You know what, you're right. Forget about Didi. Everybody wants to talk about Didi, that's the problem here. Couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about it for like a week_, _turns out she was related to somebody _important_ I guess 'cause all they wanted to talk about was her stupid dad even thought I did some really solid work on the kill right before her—like, ritual desecration stuff, but ironically? Like, as a _commentary_ on the media's obsession with satanic conspiracies when there's all this real bullshit actually—"

The knife sprouts from his stomach like a strange silver stem, and all the soft meat in the cup of his belly howls white hot. Jimmy staggers back, curls his arms around the knife, gags.

"This is _pathetic_," Johnny hisses.

Jimmy looks up. His vision is watery and uncertain, but he does see the heel coming in the moment before it slams into the stem of the knife in his stomach. It punches all the way in. Jimmy misses the first step from the landing and goes tumbling down the stairs. Each collision bangs the length of the knife against his liver.

Johnny stalks down the steps after him, and kicks Jimmy over onto his back with one booted toe when he finally reaches him.

"You _sad_, ugly little thing," Johnny says, and bends down over him at the waist. His prodding fingers search out the knife in Jimmy's gut and extract it, leaving a bubbling well of blood in its place. After a moment of watching Jimmy panting against the floor—this hurts _badly_, worse somehow than before—he plunges his hand back through the wound, splashing blood across cotton.

"You deluded little monstrosity," Johnny says, closing his fist around something that squirms and sears with pain. "Just because we share similar interests doesn't mean you're going to like me! You abomination of self-indulgence! Do you think you're like me? Do you think that's something to be _proud_ of? You're nothing but a twisted imitation of nothing, a copy of a grotesque accident."

Jimmy chokes.

"Oh don't get cold feet now," Johnny says, drawing out the wriggling bloody length of something that was not meant to see daylight. "Just when I'm getting to _know_ you. How about you show me what you're made of, oh admirer of mine."

[CLICK]

.

It is 11:30 AM on Tuesday the First, and Jimmy Eureeds is alive again.

The poster above his bed is a pin up of a sexy girl in a graveyard, skeletal hands obscuring the majority of her tits. She gives him her reliable pouty wink, as he lays there wishing the room would stop spinning so much.

So… that didn't go well.

With numb fingers, Jimmy touches the faint pearly lines of the scars that shouldn't exist, the starburst in his stomach and the line down his chest like an autopsy incision, the delicate choker below his adams apple. He half thinks that if Johnny were to press his fingers against Jimmy's chest, it would leave five finger-shaped burn marks.

This is isn't fucking working and he doesn't understand _why._ All the Woman had to do was smile at Johnny and he'd looked like someone hit him with hammer. What did _she _have that Jimmy didn't have?

Jimmy rolls over on his side and wraps his arms around his chest. He wants Johnny to talk gently to _him_, to laugh with _him_.

He lays there for a long time, exhausted, suddenly aware that as far as he can tell he hasn't slept since the morning of the first failed pitch. He's been opened up and touched cruelly and mocked with hardly a break for days, and everything inside him is _sore_.

"What am I doing wrong," he mutters. "I'm just like you… I'm just…"

The bed is empty except for him, but he imagines a depression in the mattress, the soft sound of a body shifting on flannel. Johnny C. rolls over onto his side and looks at Jimmy with his knifepoint eyes, his cruel cheekbone cradled in his palm. "I don't like myself very much," he says.

"Oh," Jimmy says. And then, "_Oh_."

The mattress is empty. The flannel smells like cotton and sleep.

"Maybe I'll wear a different shirt," he mumbles.

The pile of clothes in his room is nearly knee high—he's got no closet space, it's mostly full of his metal work supplies stacked in cardboard boxes, and there wasn't much room to start with—and he digs out one of his other shirts, with a BAND LOGO across the chest, and leaves the Noodle Boy shirt behind with no small pang of disappointment. A lot of time went into making that shirt. He'd been really proud of it.

"Sorry," he tells it, "_I_ like you."

If Johnny doesn't like himself, well, first of all Jimmy doesn't understand how that's possible because Johnny is a living masterpiece, he glows, he makes the moon wax full just to behold him, and he's the funniest person Jimmy has ever seen to boot. But that's how it _is_ with artists, isn't it? You're not a real artist unless you're tortured.

Jimmy holds his shirt to his chest for a moment, pressing the bunched fabric tight against his body.

If Johnny doesn't like himself, Jimmy will do that for him. It's kind of romantic actually, now that he thinks about it. To be _everything_ to someone, the lifeline, the lens on the telescope pointed at the profound beauty of the galaxy, the lone hand extended down into the oubliette… what _could_ be more romantic than that? Jimmy will show him how important he is, how essential his work is, but he'll do it _slowly_, so Johnny doesn't have a chance to spook and run.

Jimmy goes through his morning routine with his feet only half touching the ground.

As a consequence, he's moving slow enough on the stairs that the beer can wallops him right on the temple, splashing cheap liquid down his neck and making his skull glow like it's red hot and two sizes too small.

"_Jesus dad,"_ he yowls, clutching himself as the can bounces down the steps like the world's meanest slinky trick.

His dad swears incoherently from the darkness. Jimmy slinks down the steps, palm to the hot bump forming on his forehead. You can't be happy for a second in this shithole. He kicks the pizza box out of his way and it goes flopping across the litter-strewn floor like a greasy lethargic butterfly.

"Where're _you _going," James Sr. demands. "You deadbeat little leech, when're you gonna do something about this shit shack?"

"Never, okay!" Jimmy says, whirling. "I'm not doing shit about this place 'cause I'm getting _out _of it!"

"Oh yeah?" His dad lumbers closer, his shape just visible against the slitted light from the kitchen shutters. "Where're you gonna _go,_ boy? You're not gonna hit the streets with a face like _yours_. Who'd have a piece of shit like you?"

Jimmy grabs blindly for the doorknob, wrenches it open to the clear wash of daylight and fresh air. "I ain't been awake long enough to deal with this," he says.

"It's nearly fuckin noon!" his dad shouts.

Jimmy slams the door closed behind him.

The clean daylight seems to give a sigh around him as he leaves that musty junkyard behind, setting off down the road. When he's Johnny's partner, they won't live like this. There won't be any beer-swilling bastard fathers or miserable mornings. They'll run this town, hell in the alleys, terror in the streets—blood-streaked in the moonlight, their laughter rattling the skyscrapers—Jimmy at his side, confidant, student, _muse_…

He can see them now, together in the night, as Johnny turns to him laughing, wipes blood from his cheek, and pauses. It's the stars reflecting in Johnny's black eyes, or the way his hard lines go soft, the breathless moment that he realizes he isn't _alone_ anymore.

Jimmy sighs, steps off the curb, and then the bus comes sailing through the crosswalk, nearly clipping him as he throws himself across the curb and out of its path. His case pops out of his hands and skids to a stop on the same concrete grit that grinds into his hands. The bus comes to a rusty halt beside the bus stop a few dozen feet away.

"_Fuck_," he says, slapping his hand against the sandy glitter, "that gets me every time!"

Jimmy rights himself as the passengers stream off and pushes through them, bounced between their shoulders as they shove past him like salmon up a stream. One of these times, he's going to remember the bus.

He spends the ride revising his pitch, muttering to himself under his breath, fingers picking nervously as the fraying vinyl of the seat. One by one the others disembark, until he is alone with the driver in a quiet little neighborhood in the middle of a ruined suburb. His pulse stutters in his wrists.

He's not gonna fuck it up this time. He's got it, he's got a handle on it. The pitch wasn't working before because he wasn't pitching the right _thing_, but when Johnny hears what he's got to offer this time, he won't be able to turn it down.

When the door slides back, revealing Johnny's shadowed face, Jimmy smiles his most endearing smile and says, "Hi, you don't know me yet, but you'll want to."

[CLICK]

Alive and whole, Jimmy wakes up, and slams his fist down on the bedside table in frustration.

"Hi, I'm Jimmy, and I've been following you."

[CLICK]

"You and I could do amazing work together! I have a lot to contribute—"

[CLICK]

"—the earlier stuff, when you didn't let the killing get to you so much. You had more fun with it! That's what I'm here for—"

[CLICK]

"—the blood is what matters, you know? You've just gotta get back to—"

[CLICK]

Jimmy slams the door to his house, cutting off the vicious muttering dwindling into the unlit kitchen. As he lets go of the knob, he hears a heavy fluttering, like the wind shaking canvas. That's _different._ That's not supposed to be there. He turns from the door to find several pairs of liquid black eyes tracking his movement from the sickly gum tree in the yard, fat black crows in the withered brown leaves.

He eyes them. They eye him right back.

"I ain't dead _yet_," he tells them. "Christ, have a little faith."

As the bus shakes and rattles him over each familiar pothole, Jimmy tries not to think about the taste of his teeth, or the sound of his heart pumping in the open, blood-smelling air. At the end of his wearied and repetitive travail, he arrives in the same fucking place he always does. The bus grinds away behind him, leaving him alone in the ruined suburb, shriveled sullen flowers sprouting from the dirt lawns. One more time. He can do this. He can do this. He…

He can't do it.

His knees go wobbly; he collapses onto the side of the street where the sickly yellow grass has eaten away the edges of the asphalt. He can't do it. In his head he can already smell the cool damp rot, sweet and sickly, the dim ceiling of that house closing over him like a coffin lid. How many times can a guy die before the pressure gets to him?

After a while, a plastic cup full of juice appears at his side.

"Would you like some tang?" a small voice asks.

"Sure," Jimmy says absently, and knocks back a mouthful of lukewarm tangy liquid. It's pretty good. Too much sugar probably. But he hasn't eaten in like… well however long he's been looping this day, so he's not gonna say no to a little substance.

He's halfway into the drink before he thinks to check where it came from. Jimmy pauses with the cup to his mouth and looks over, to where a scrawny looking kid with big doe eyes is watching him drink his tang.

"Uh," Jimmy says. "What's… going on?"

The kid sort of jumps, like he wasn't expecting Jimmy to notice him. "Oh," he says, "I live in the house there—" he points at the next house down the street, sitting between Jimmy's grass-eaten curb and Johnny's venus fly house. The front step of the place rings a bell, as Jimmy glances over it.

"You're the kid who gave me directions," Jimmy says, "the first time."

"Um, no, I don't think so," the kid says, but politely. "I just saw you out here on the curb and thought you looked kind of sad. I like your shirt."

Jimmy hesitates, and then grabs the shoulder of his shirt, pulling it until he can make out the BAND LOGO printed across the back face. He can just make out the white swoop of a steaming cauldron on the black fabric.

"Oh, Night Witch," he says. "Yeah, they've got a kinda _Ramones_ sound, sometimes they play at the Shark Tank. I tried to go to a show once, but I had to leave about half way through because this douchebag with bad hair poured his beer out right in front of my feet and I fell into the pit."

"Wow," the kid says, "that sounds terrible."

Jimmy whips around. "It _was_," he says, relieved and also kind of mad about it all over again. "I haven't been to another show since then, it was so fucking embarrassing. Sorry, fudging. Fudging embarrassing."

"It's okay," the kid says, "my daddy cusses around me all the time."

"Dads, huh," Jimmy says, and takes a thoughtful sip of tang. "You wanna sit down, kid?"

The kid fidgets. "It's Todd," he says, "and I really shouldn't. Things seem to go really bad around me, and you look sad enough as it is."

Jimmy looks him up and down. "Around _you_, huh?"

Despite his immediately preceding protests, Todd takes a seat on the ground beside Jimmy, folding his hands in his lap. "Do you ever get the feeling that the architect of your suffering is something beyond your control? I mean, what are the chances that so many terrible things happen to one person! Is it my fault? Is it God? Sometimes I think there's somebody up there who's so bitter and mean that they just can't stand to see people down here happy for more than a minute. Like they only _let _you be happy because they know it'll hurt worse when you have to watch whatever you love die."

Jimmy slurps tang, eyeing the tiny existential crisis on the asphalt beside him. "How old are you, seven?"

"I'm ten," Todd says, sounding a bit wounded.

Jimmy switches his gaze to the house immediately across the street, a disintegrating two story with a bad whitewash. This whole neighborhood is like a pauper's grave, bodies sagging under the sunshine.

"I was about your age when my mom left," he muses. "Hits early don't it? Maybe somebody up there does hate us."

"Mr. Pepito's Dad says that this world is a vestry of bad taste."

"You mean a travesty."

"Oh. Probably."

A plastic shopping bag creeps across the pavement with a soft skittering sound. After a moment, Todd says, hesitating, "Was your mommy nice?"

Jimmy considers this for a minute. "No," he decides, after careful examination. "She thought I could do better. Be tougher. I got picked on a lot, and when I told her about it she used to whoop my ass. Butt. Sorry."

Todd frowns deeply, his baby forehead lining like an old man's.

"It's fine!" Jimmy says, belatedly aware of how that sounds. "My mom's big into self sufficiency. She didn't want me to go tattling to her for help when I could deal with the problem myself. Don't rely on anybody!" Jimmy licks the rim of the empty glass, thoughtfully. "She used to say that. _Don't count on nobody or no thing!" _

"Did you… deal with it?" Todd says, a note of hopefulness in his voice.

"Holy shit no," Jimmy says, "my skinny ass? I just tried to get out of the way. Eh, but she was right about it, she was always right. Bet she's making it big wherever she is, the old…" he shoots Todd a glance, "…witch."

Todd's face falls. Jimmy feels bad. "Hey," he says, "but you're the neighbor of the beast! Imagine anybody trying to pick a fight with you."

Todd stiffens. "You mean the scary neighbor man," he says.

Well that wasn't a very hospitable tone of voice. Jimmy glances at the house, coffin and casket, under the bleeding yellow sun. The first pang in his gut is resentful suspicion—who _wouldn't_ like Johnny, except another loping Neanderthal bastard? But then the grim specter of that house sinks into him again, and the spark sputters and dies. Even he, devoted as he is to everything Nny represents, is starting to get a bad feeling about that house.

"Ah," he sighs, "you'll understand when you're older."

"If I make it that long," Todd says, grimly. His tiny boy hands are interlocked tightly, squeezing themselves.

Jimmy sets down his empty cup. He knows _that_ tone of voice, because he's heard it in his own mouth.

Jimmy twists around, and he sets his hands heavily on Todd's shoulders. "My advice to you," he says, "is _run_. Be faster than them today, and then someday you'll be strong enough to get even. You just gotta make it to tomorrow. Survive. There'll be a reckoning for all of them soon enough! Get even! Let it fester, let it build until it _pops_ -"

Todd lets out a squeaking noise, like an overheated kettle, and Jimmy realizes a little too late he's been shaking the kid. He lets go. He coughs.

"Anyway," he says. "Thanks for the tang."

Todd is leaning so far away from him he's on the verge of topping over, but he still says, "You're, um, welcome."

Jimmy stands up. "I guess I'll give it one more try," he says, heavily. "If this doesn't work, I don't know what I'm gonna do."

"You're not going _over_ there, are you?" Todd says, his eyes wide as saucers.

With his case in hand, Jimmy pauses. "Don't worry about it," he says, "he'll probably just eviscerate me again. I haven't seen any of the _really_ nasty stuff."

The tea kettle noise is happening again. Jimmy shifts uneasily and then, for lack of other options, pats Todd on his little head. His hair is cut at strange angles, like he did it himself.

"Please don't go," Todd says. "I can't stand watching everyone I talk to get killed."

Jimmy wavers. Maybe what he needs to do _is_ give it a break. Maybe today is just cursed. Today is _clearly_ cursed, actually. Maybe he needs to sleep this exhausting travail off and come at it fresh tomorrow.

"What should I do instead?" he finds himself saying.

Todd sags with relief. "There's a convenience store down the road," he says, pointing. "You could get a chilidog."

Mmm. Chilidog. "Okay," Jimmy says, "I guess I _could_ use a break."

The convenience store isn't super close, as it turns out. He walks for a while, as afternoon creeps into evening, under the surly light of the sinking sun. He's definitely hungry by the time he arrives. Everything is black against the light, purple shadows under the amber glower. And he's tired of carrying this _case_. As a car pulls up somewhere around the corner, he stops and shakes out his arm, searching for somewhere to store the thing in vain. There's the ice machine, but anyone could walk by and grab it. Fuck, he's so tired of this. Of _everything._

He pushes into the store, into the chill stale-smelling air, just in time to find that everything is _fucked_. A familiar pair of delicate hands is pushing a bag of chips across the counter, hands that have plunged whole and bare into the cavern of Jimmy's living stomach more than once.

He stops dead in his tracks.

"Do you want a bag for that," the far away cashier mumbles.

_Fuck. _Why did he assume Johnny would be in that house all day? This is what he gets for taking Johnny as a stationary object—He _knows_ Johnny leaves regularly, he's pretty sure he's followed Johnny to this exact store at some point, although now he has to wonder how he got this far and only _then_ got turned around, it's a straight shot back into the neighborhood, basically.

As he's standing there, frozen, the doorbell chimes behind him, and a couple of rough looking fucks come muscling past him. One of them slams his shoulder with the flat of their hand. He stumbles, hip cracking against the snow globe display, and a tumble of tiny glittering cityscapes shatter across the floor.

The cashier whips up with a glare. "No rough housing," he says.

Jimmy gives him a dumbfounded look, wondering in what world he could be mistaken for some kind of _rough-houser,_ when the douchenozzle in the unseasonable traffic-cone orange jacket drags out a gun. The one in the beanie kicks over a chip shelf for emphasis.

"I want money!" Jacket-douche shouts. "Money now!"

The guy behind the register just sighs. "I'm off my shift in like _five _minutes," he says, "can you just come back later?"

"_Now!"_ Jacket-douche howls.

"Okay, okay, christ," the cashier says.

In the middle of this, Johnny is considering the scene with vague interest, sucking on the straw of an ice freezie. "Didn't you guys rob the place last week?" he asks. "I swear I know your face."

Jacket-douche whips around, drawing a bead on Johnny. "No witnesses!" he says, semi-hysterically, gun hand shaking.

In the moment it takes for Johnny to narrow his eyes, Jimmy has three thoughts. One: Johnny can't die here, because he has to be in his house in three hours to receive Jimmy as a visitor. Two: _Unless_ something about Jimmy's change of plans in this iteration of today sent causality into a tailspin. Three: if Johnny dies here now, all this has been for _nothing._

Jimmy takes a step forward—his foot crunches snow globe glass—Jacket whips around to find the source of the unexpected noise—

Down the barrel of the gun, a bullet bursts from the chamber—

[CLICK]

Jimmy grabs his pillow and pulls it over his face, muffling a series of frustrated screams.

-x-

The bell chimes as Jimmy slinks through the door of the CD Cesspool like a particularly sullen and fast moving species of mold. It takes his eyes a second to adjust to the dimness. Fish looks up from his magazine, licks his snakebites like a nervous animal, and says, "Don't stand in the doorway man, there's spooks out there."

Jimmy glares at him. "There's nobody out there but the same fuckin panhandler out there every day. Got me _right _in the ankle too, the bastard."

"I saw them watching," Fish says, shifting his magazine nervously. "Coupl'a guys in sunglasses on the corner. I _know_ they know I know, that's why they're watching me, they know I know."

"Fish, it's summertime, people wear sunglasses. Stop smoking that shit."

Fish hunches down like he's trying to hide his slight frame behind the pages of his softcore porno. "It's called gangstalking, it was invented by the Gestapo. To silence dissenters."

"I don't think you've ever dissented from anything in your life, especially not if it was rolled and flammable."

In the back of the store, someone in a big unseasonable coat tries to fit an entire vinyl record under their clothes. It doesn't work. "Hey!" Fish says, twisting around to level the shoplifter with a fuzzy glare. "If you want that you better have _money_, pal."

Jimmy slumps over the counter, his cheek smeared against the glass. Underneath the glass, there are ticket stubs from shows going back as far as the seventies. No idea whose those are, cause as far as he can tell, Fish is younger than Jimmy and the owner isn't much better.

"You got it easy," he says, a little smooshed from the glass and all. "I _wish_ I was being stalked."

"Uh huh."

"I can't even get him to take an _interest_ in me."

Fish squints at Jimmy. He nudges his face with the corner of the magazine. "Are you like… complaining about your relationship drama right now? Is that what's happening?"

"I can't get him to say a _single_ nice thing to me," Jimmy says, "and I've hit every con_ceivable_ angle. I tried talking about his work, I tried talking about his life, I tried telling him all the things he was doing wrong—"

"Yeah, you're definitely telling me about your relationship drama."

Jimmy waves a hand listlessly. "It's like, I know everything _about_ you, I've devoted myself _to_ you, why won't you give me a _chance_?"

"I didn't even know you were a fag," Fish says, poking him with the corner again.

"Fuck off," Jimmy says, batting the magazine away. "If I didn't _really_ want to keep listening to your record collection I'd skin you for that."

Fish nods. "You're not the first person to say that to me."

Facedown against the glass now, 90% muffled, Jimmy says, "It ain't _fair_."

The pages of the magazine shuffle as Fish shrugs. "Everybody tells me life isn't supposed to be. We are all of us fortune's fools."

Jimmy rolls his head over just enough to glare blearily at Fish. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Dunno. Who's your boyfriend?"

"He's not my _boyfriend_," Jimmy says, screwing up his face at the taste of the world. "He's my mentor, my role model! And I'm the guy who's trying to get his ungrateful ass in _gear_."

"What," Fish says, "like a sidekick?"

"Yes!" Jimmy snaps his fingers. "Like a sidekick! Like in Batman."

A glossy color photo flashes with the light from the overhead florescent. "I heard Batman fucked Robin too," Fish says.

"Will you stop _saying_ that," Jimmy snaps.

"It just sounds pederastic, is all."

"You don't even know him."

"No-" _fwip_, page turn, "-guess not."

"He should be _thanking _me," Jimmy snarls, thumping the glass, "but he won't give me a _chance!"_

Fish looks up for the first time, giving him something that actually might be a sympathetic look. "…You wanna listen to the new EP we got in? Some Manson guy."

Jimmy wrinkles his nose. "Like the Helterskelter dude?" he says. "No thanks. I've heard it, it's all jangly hippy stuff, there's not even any murder in it. "

"Uhh, I don't think it's the same thing-"

"Forget it," Jimmy says, pushing himself up from the counter with all the enthusiasm of a somewhat exhausted mold. "I guess I'll just go… try the pitch _again_, for the millionth fuckin' time…"

Fish licks his finger and flips a page. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time—" He shakes out the centerfold, which hits the countertop with a sharp _thwick_.

Jimmy gives him a hard side-eye, but he doesn't look up from the centerfold and he doesn't seem to notice Jimmy eyeballing him, so whatever, forget it. Jimmy snatches up his case and shuffles back out into the sunshine, a little too hot now, as noon passes into afternoon. This is just a setback, he tells himself, just like the time he couldn't get the temperature in the kiln high enough and he kept ruining his leaf-spring. He figured that out, didn't he? He stayed up all night screwing with the wiring until he finally got it right, fixing the bricks, checking the sealant. And look what's come out of it!

He is certain of who he is. He knows where he's going, and he knows who he wants to be. He just has to _get_ there, somehow.

As the bus grinds to a halt, Jimmy is up at the front almost before the driver has a chance to say "What the fuck—"

"My stop," he says, and swings down onto the dusty cracked street.

He has no idea what he's going to say this time around. All his options are really exhausted, and he _doesn_'t want to try again, but he's _got_ to, because there's no other option. He's getting out, or he'll die trying.

The walk up the drive feels like climbing the scaffold of a gallows, and he has to swallow down hard before he can knock the door again. The curb is abandoned, but there's a flickering in the neighbor's window like a curtain being hastily pulled shut.

The door swings open.

"Hi," Jimmy sighs. "Do you mind if I come in?"

Johnny considers him for a moment, suspicious and cut with deep shadows. "I suppose," he says, slowly. "But only for a minute, I have a lot of existential pondering to do if I want to be finished with that in time to rage at the void before dinner."

Jimmy relaxes slightly. "Okay," he says, and steps inside. At this point, the smell of the place is enough to make his fingers start to shake, but he tunes that out as best as he can.

"So," Johnny says, closing the door behind him, "what can I do for you, Mr….?"

"Jimmy," Jimmy says, and quietly mourns the loss of his various nicknames. "Um, Eureeds."

"Hm. I'm Johnny," Johnny says. No nickname. No intimate moment.

"Yeah," Jimmy tells him, feeling pensive and melancholy. "I know."

The air changes. "_Do_ you," Johnny says, all at once very intent.

Lip tight between his teeth, Jimmy considers a temptation. Wasn't there something before about his memory before? If Johnny won't _give_ him a chance—if he can't make himself someone Johnny wants to know, why not make himself someone Johnny has no _choice_ but to know?

"Yeah, I, um," he says, "we used to be—close. Don't you remember?"

The frown that comes across Johnny's face almost looks _guilty_. Jimmy's heart picks up a beat. "We used to hang out," Jimmy says, hefting his case and clutching it against his chest, like a stuffed animal, "get up to trouble, you know…"

"Skin the neighbor kid," Johnny says, in a distant dreamy way, staring past Jimmy at something only he can see.

Jimmy does a double take. "Who, _Todd_?"

Johnny blinks, and then waves him off. "No, of course not. I think his name was Weebly, or Feeble, or something."

"Oh," Jimmy says. "Then yeah, sure."

Under Johnny's new and unfamiliar scrutiny, Jimmy does his best to hold on. And then all at once, it's nothing but smiles.

"Well!" Johnny says, taking the case right out of his hands, "How _nice_ of you to come see me after all this time! As you can see, I haven't been doing well, but I can feel all that changing. Oh yes!"

He shepherds Jimmy through the living room and towards some cluttered alcove, on the other side from what he assumes is a kitchen. "I feel lighter, unshackled from any previous literal or metaphorical masters. My own master! Yes!"

Johnny sits him down on an overturned wooden box marked NAILS and pulls over another box, this one stained with a dark color at the bottom corners. The cardboard hardly creaks when Johnny drops down on it, crossing his knees and leaning forward. He steeples his fingers.

"What was I like?"

The lightbulb of a Christmas string light grinds under Jimmy's foot. His hands are sweating. "What were you-?"

"Like! Yes!" Johnny says. "Was I cheerful? Terribly sensitive? Did I like hiking?"

Jimmy's poker face has never been _good_, exactly. Apparently Nny can read some of his distress on his face, because he drops his steepled hands all at once.

"That bad, huh?" he says. He sits forward, chin in hand and elbow on knee. He looks off through the shoddily boarded window, forehead creased. "I suppose I always knew. You don't get to be what I am without a bad foundation. It must be termites to the core, this one."

"No!" Jimmy says, "No, you're—you were incredible!"

Johnny makes a face. "You don't have to baby me, it makes my skin itch."

"You _are_ incredible," Jimmy insists. "You're a visionary! You could always see right to the core of things, right to the rotten black center."

"Mmph." Johnny is still looking out the window. "I don't feel incredible. I feel… _clouded_. I want to be _un_clouded, to burn off this fetid smelling fog and see the stars again."

Jimmy is at a loss. In all his desperate midnight fantasies, flannel sheets knotted tight in his hands, he never imagined a moment like this. In his imagination, it's mostly him pouring his heart out to Johnny, hoping on the edge of his breath that Johnny will see the shards among the black wreckage, touch him, gather him up and put him back together.

"When I look at you," he says, "_I_ see stars."

Johnny freezes. "I'm sorry?" he says.

Jimmy licks his lip. This is probably stupid, but he can't stop himself now that he's here, now that the first fairytale toad has dropped from his tongue.

"You're—you inspire me," Jimmy says, knuckles going white as he clutches his knees. "Everything I am is because of you—I was going under when I found you, and you took me and you dragged me out of the water and you let me breathe your air, and it was—it was sweet—"

"Oh," Johnny says softly, with his forehead creased. "I see."

"When I saw you I understood," Jimmy says, "all those years I thought I was too weak to be worth saving, but I wasn't _weak_, I was just _blunt_. So I sharpened myself and I sharpened myself and I cut myself down into a weapon like you are. You taught me to hurt the things that hurt me, the things that _could_ hurt me, to hurt first and hit hard!"

Johnny stands up, and something about the sight of him _going_ triggers a flood of desperate promises from Jimmy's mouth, bubbling up like blood or vomit, bitter and unstoppable. Is he even listening? He _can't_ go now. As Johnny rummages through a stack of trash around the termite-wrinkled wall, the wrench in Jimmy's heart threatens to tear him in two.

"If you could just let me be that for you," Jimmy babbles, "I could show you the dark beauty of your calling! If you don't like yourself then you can let me do that _for_ you! If you're not clear then I can be your eyes! I have so much to contribute, anything you need—anything you want—_use_ me, I'm at your service, you don't even have to teach me. I'll teach myself!"

Johnny comes back to him, sedate pace at odd with the frantic chatter coming out of Jimmy, and with clean precision, slams twin blades deep into the backs of Jimmy's hands. The ripping points pin him to the box of nails, their deep cut creaking the wood as Jimmy shouts in pain.

"—_Johnny_!"

Johnny looks down at him for a moment, and then leaves the room. In the moment he's gone, Jimmy stares down at his bleeding hands with blurry eyes and wonders if he should even bother trying to get free. This is the closest he's ever been to getting it right, and if _this_ doesn't work, what's left?

"Why won't you _listen to me!" _he shouts, his eyelids hot with saltwater. "I waited my whole life for someone like you, and you won't even give me a day!"

Johnny reappears in the doorway. He is still, as still as the surface of a clear lake, the bottom a hundred feet deep and populated with the bleached bones of giants. In his hand there is something distinctly not a knife.

"For what it's worth," Johnny says, "I am sorry for what I've done."

Jimmy blinks tears out of his vision, struggling to see. "Is that—Johnny, that's not a—"

"I can see the damage is already too deep," Johnny says. "Irreparable, what I've done to you. Unpardonable."

"That's a gun," Jimmy says, "I don't understand, Johnny, you don't use—"

Johnny comes across the floor, the pistol loose at his side, with a strange and terrifying grace. "Only for important things," he says, "usually myself. But, well, I've already warmed it up for you, I suppose."

"Don't do this," Jimmy begs, for the first time, unloading every ounce of misery into his hitching voice, "_please_, Johnny."

Johnny reaches into his pocket and fishes out a black glove, steadying it with his gun hand, pulling it the rest of the way on with his teeth. He watches his fingers close once, twice, creasing the seams of the thin leather. He reaches out and touches Jimmy's face, a cool gentleness that catches his chin and pushes it up, exposing his soft throat. The water-stained ceiling takes up the field of Jimmy's vision.

"No one else should have to live this life," Johnny says. "Death would be a mercy."

The water-stains across the ceiling form a dark milky way through the plaster. "I'm starting to think it would be," Jimmy whispers.

"For your sake," Johnny says, "I hope I am only _very_ mad, and there is nothing after this life. I guess you can tell me, someday, when I catch up with you."

The muzzle of the pistol is cold against Jimmy's chin. He doesn't want to do this.

"Why do you only touch me when you're _hurting_ me," Jimmy asks, the first flicker of real anger smoldering to life in his chest.

"That's what I am," Johnny says. "And that's what you are too. There's nothing left in you but starvation and suffering."

Jimmy grits his teeth. "_Fuck _you, Johnny."

Johnny _tsk_s. "Don't be like that. We're old friends, aren't we?"

"_Fuck_ you," Jimmy spits, "if you hate yourself so much you can't even stand to look at me, _fuck _you, and _fuck_ me for loving you—"

"You don't know how to love," Johnny says. "How could you?"

The gun goes off. For a moment, Jimmy feels nothing. And then—

Jimmy Eureeds wakes up spitting. He tastes gunpowder, thick and pungent in his mouth.

\- **x -**

Jimmy wakes up livid and _steaming_. He throws off the sheets and stomps across the floor—at the sound of his dad's shouting he takes the lamp from the desk and hurls it across the floor, smashing it into ugly tooth-edged chunks that cut his feet as he walks through them without stopping. He wrenches open the fish food and throws the whole canister into the tank.

It is 11:30 AM on Tuesday the First, and Jimmy Eureeds is in his own bedroom, whole and alive and bleeding hurt like a viscous liquid from the invisible wound beneath his chin.

How _dare_ Johnny say that. After everything Jimmy has been through, after the—after _he—_

"_Don't know how to love,"_ he mutters, his fingers shaking too hard to open drawers. "Don't know how to—"

_Fuck_ it. If Johnny's just going to kill him for fucking existing, he might as do something worth being murdered for.

He doesn't bother to put on his face. He pulls on clothes at random, hair a mess, barefoot as he rips the curved dirk from the tool case and leaves the rest in a pile on the floor. Two steps down the staircase and he lunges out to catch the projectile beer can in mid-air, half crushing it in his grip.

Somewhere in the ratty darkness below him, his dad swears incoherently.

Jimmy reels back and launches the can across the room, where it hits the wall beside his dad's head and sprays foam over everything.

"If you want a clean house so god damn bad, try not throwing your _garbage _everywhere!" Jimmy shouts, leaning so far over the bannister that the whole thing groans under him. "Jesus fuck, what are you, brain damaged?"

"You can't talk to me like that!" James Sr. snaps, staggering forward into the light.

"You won't remember it anyways!" Jimmy snarls, and slams out the door before his dad can say anything else. In the yard, bare feet skittering over rocks, he points a finger at the crow-specked tree and shouts, "Wait your fucking turn you flying rodents!"

The hilt of the dirk is hot in his hand. He stalks down to the bus stop, several minutes ahead of the 12:00, and waits there until it arrives. As the old glass doors squeal open, he squeezes the hilt.

He does not leave one passenger intact.

When the shaking bus driver finally deposits him at the downtown stop, blood gushes from the step down onto the curb like hell's own red carpet, winding its way to the gutters and down into the darkness.

He walks through the street like a ghost in the sunlight, the denim of his jeans drying tacky and stiff, knife wet in his hand. People turn and blink at him, dumb as cows, not believing the thing their eyes are showing them. He thrusts out his hand and catches a man at a parking meter by the chin, drives the dirk into his belly and wrenches it upward like he's gutting an animal. Ropes of streaky, fatty organs cascade across the sand-glinting concrete. After that, people start moving.

His feet carry him down into the towering heart of downtown, amid the shouting and scraping and the distant sounds of police sirens wailing through congested traffic. The woman he catches by the ponytail leaves her $300 sneakers in a pool of blood, crawling away. There is a crash, a deafening _crunch_, and the first police officer arrives on the scene by plowing several inches deep into a parked sedan. Jimmy whirls around, and all at once the scene comes into focus for him, the canopy of the trees planted along the street, the whirl of lights inside their hard plastic cases, the smell of blood and stomach acid on his arms.

The grit of the sidewalk scrapes under his feet as he turns.

"You wanna see what I'm good for?" he mutters, fixing his unblinking vision on the police officer, huddling behind his cruiser door.

The pig shouts into his radio for back up, sidearm aimed on Jimmy.

"Lemme show you what I'm good for," Jimmy mutters, picking up speed, "lemme show you what I'm—"

The gunshot rattles the glass in the windowsills—Jimmy staggers, his side blown wide with pain and wet heat. He looks up. The cop is taking aim again with his shaking hands, and meanwhile the summer air is swirling with sirens, panic and cacophony, as Jimmy's side pours out a wave of fresh blood. In the moment before the bastard can fire again, Jimmy lifts his dirk to his neck and saws through the thin line of the scar that stretches now from ear to ear.

[CLICK]

Jimmy launches out of bed, throat sore but body whole, and this time he does pull on his boots, because where he's going he needs every bit of edge he can get. He leaves his home in a whirl of crows taking off into the sky, dozens of wings snapping like cloth in the wind, black feathers catching blue light.

He touches no one on the bus. His mind is already several minutes ahead, and they are barely ghosts to him.

"You _live_ like this," he mutters, as he stalks down the chewed asphalt towards the house that sits black under the yellow August sun.

He knocks. When Johnny swings the door open, he finds the tip of Jimmy's dirk at his throat.

"_Hello_," Johnny says, narrowly.

"You _live_ like this," Jimmy says, and takes a step forward. Johnny retreats a step, letting the door creak the rest of the way open without his grip.

"I'm sorry," Johnny says, and pushes the tip of the dirk away with one bare fingertip, "but I've already been killed once today and I am in no mood to repeat the process."

"Well what a _fucking_ coincidence!"

Johnny retreats slowly, his boots creaking the withered floorboards, as Jimmy advances.

"You're a walking massacre! You're a nuclear leak in a fishing harbor! You're fucking Chernobyl!" Jimmy shouts. "You're a monster just like me, and killing me won't change that! _You're_ the one who doesn't know how to love, not me!"

He backs Johnny up deeper into the house, his breath hissing out between his teeth. "You've spent your whole life _making_ yourself what you are," he snarls, "and then the second you're confronted with what it _means_ to be what you are, you lose your fucking nerve!"

Jimmy lunges, blade swiping empty air as Johnny scrambles back. This house is a dark hill of trash and Johnny weaves between it with unconscious ease, the boxes and broken furniture, heels and toe tips.

"You tried to let me go the first time! I should have gone, I should have just _gone!_"

Johnny's hand swipes a kitchen knife from where it is buried deep in a table leg, deep in the cluttered grime. He twirls the handle in his grip, so that the serrated blade points down, and surges forward. All at once, Jimmy can feel the passage of Johnny's breath, his scarecrow weight—and then the kitchen knife plunges between his ribs like Van Helsing's stake, down into his lung.

The dirk drops from his fingers.

Johnny keeps hold of his own weapon, but his other hand—_oh_—supports Jimmy's back as he starts to cough.

"Shh," Johnny says, sinking to the floor. Jimmy goes down with him, choking and bleeding, in the cradle of his arms.

It's a nightmare of comfort, the delicate shape of Johnny's ribs under his ratty shirt, the soft tide of his voice. There was a dream like this once, a memory that comes back to Jimmy in fragments, and hasn't he been waiting since the beginning for someone to hold him through his hurt, to speak to him gently—

"You're right of course," Johnny tells him, "I am a fucking despicable accident of toxic spillover. Pardon me if I don't remember you. It's all a part of the sickness."

Blood foams on Jimmy's lips in specks with each cough. His fingers are wound so tight in Johnny's sleeves that they start to lose feeling; he is trying to pull Johnny closer, to hear the heartbeat that he can already half feel through the tissue flesh. His hero is a terribly little thing, not much more than the bone that makes him up. No wonder Jimmy thought he was taller. There's hardly anything to him but upward motion.

"It's so rare that I have to see the deleterious effect of my existence on another person," Johnny says. "I usually kill them before it can all go bad. I'm very sorry I didn't catch you while you were still whole and hopeful."

His heartbeat is so slow and calm. Jimmy shudders against him. This sweetness is so strange and so _late_, the twisted fulfillment of his thousand midnight fantasies, mud from a silver chalice.

Johnny lays him down on the floor gently, and Jimmy's breath is rattling inside him like glass shards but he can't help longing to be held even a moment longer. Everything he is writhes and claws to come out of his skin, to touch what touches him.

"It'll take you a while to die like this," Johnny says, fingers lighting on the hilt of the knife. "Would you like me to do the other one?"

Even the bare touch of Johnny's fingers on the hilt makes Jimmy's lung spasm with pain. His heartbeat feels like a red hot brand. Jimmy closes his eyes. "Yeah," he croaks.

There's a sick squelch as Johnny rips the knife free. He looks down at Jimmy, a new and delicate expression on his face, almost—almost fond, almost wistful. He lifts the knife.

Knowing Johnny, there is probably a monologue after that, but Jimmy isn't there to hear it.

[CLICK]

Jimmy comes into the CD Cesspool splattered with blood, only half aware of where his feet have taken him. He feels nothing. He is nothing. He doesn't remember anything since the red lights of the alarm clock this morning, not the rattling shell of the bus or the slosh of lukewarm beer. He can't remember a single face he's seen this morning, and so he feels nothing for them either.

The doorbell chimes. Fish looks up nervously, licks his snakebites.

His usual greeting dissolves in his mouth.

It's the familiar face, Jimmy thinks—it's the fact that he's known Fish since summer started, and his face is familiar, and that's why some of the fog dissipates in the moment that Fish's widening eyes fix on his blood-streaked clothing. He'll have to kill Fish too, now, he guesses. What other choice does he have.

And then Fish says, "Are you _okay_?"

The question is so strange - is he _okay,_ is he _what?_ \- Jimmy's knees hit the floor. It hurts, it rattles him all the way up his spine, and it's so strange to be hurting without smelling that house, without the cool touch of Johnny's fingers holding him down.

"Holy shit," Fish's far away voice says.

He is shaking, Jimmy realizes belatedly. His chest is heaving, thick and choking—he's _crying_. Oh, of course he's crying. That makes sense.

When he looks up, sniffling hard, he finds Fish crouched in front of him, brow creased.

"You need me to call someone?" Fish asks him.

Jimmy snorts out a wet laugh, almost indistinguishable from the rest. "Who the hell would you even call?" he says. "You wanna call my bastard dad up here so he can beat my ass too?"

"I was thinking 911," Fish replies, not amused, apparently.

Jimmy starts hiccupping so hard he can barely get air into his lungs. His eyeballs feel hot, but it feels _good_, Christ he can't remember the last time he cried. Killers don't cry. That was always his problem, wasn't it. Too fucking soft. Just like his mom always said.

Fish tosses his head, shaking strands of his long Mohawk out of his face, and peers at Jimmy. The vaguely concussed look in Fish's eyes sharpens for the first time in any iteration of this day, the flecks of honey color in his brown eyes flashing. His hand shoots out, fingertips prodding Jimmy's throat, and Jimmy freezes, squeezing his fists and biting down in preparation for blood.

But nothing happens, except for the soft pressure of fingertips tracing a line from ear to ear.

"What's _this_?" Fish says, with a frown that almost seems pained, like looking at Jimmy is hurting him.

The next thing he knows, Fish is hooking a finger in the collar of his shirt and tugging it down, revealing the long pearly line that disappears down into the grip of soft cotton. Jimmy lets him do it, hands limp against the sticky tile, leaning automatically into the touch.

"You didn't have these yesterday," Fish says. "Did you?"

"…No," Jimmy says. "Not on July thirty-first."

Fish looks up. "What's going on?" he asks.

Jimmy wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. "Later today I'm supposed to go visit this guy, give him my elevator pitch. He kills me. And every time he kills me, I just come right back to the beginning of the day, like—like someone's putting coins into my game, every time I run out of lives."

Fish narrows his eyes. "Yeah?"

Jimmy glances past him. "I guess that's pretty freakish," he says. "I thought it was a dream the first time."

"Maybe you're in Hell," Fish says.

Jimmy stares at the wall, stomach dropping like a ride at the fair. "Holy shit, what if I am."

"Doesn't really explain why I'm here," Fish adds, screwing up his face. "I definitely haven't died. I'd remember that."

Jimmy groans. Fish climbs to his feet and offers Jimmy a hand up. After a moment of uncertainty, Jimmy takes it and allows himself to be pulled up.

"Well, dead or alive or tripping the worst trip of your damn life," Fish says, "sounds like you could use a break. I'm gonna find you that new EP we just got in. It seems your speed."

Jimmy leans against the counter, just breathing, until Fish comes back with a CD and his own walkman, scratched blue plastic and stickers shaped like music notes. Jimmy forgets to lift his hands when Fish offers it to him, so Fish—without missing a beat—sets it on the counter and fixes the headphones over Jimmy's ears, cutting off the ambient noise of the store with a neat snap.

Fish prods the "play" button, and the seductive grind of a male singer wells up in the speakers.

From the first song on the CD to the last song, Jimmy sits behind Fish's side of the counter with his knees against his chest. His back to the wooden shelves, he watches Fish's doc martins come and go, assisting various customers. He likes the music. The heavy synthesizer on the voice is soothing.

He pulls off the headphones, after the last track, and offers up the walkman silently.

Fish glances down at him. "Feel better?" he asks.

It dawns on Jimmy, after all, that Fish _is_ trying to make him feel better. And after Jimmy came in here with half a mind to kill him, too. For a second time, restless guilt wells up inside his shriveled heart.

"Yeah," he manages. "Thanks."

Fish tucks away the walkman and returns the CD to its case. "So what're you gonna do?" he says.

Jimmy sighs, lets his head thump back against shelving. "I should probably scratch this game," he says, "I made a mess on my way here. After that… after that I don't know. I don't want to go back. But I don't know who I am, if I don't go back."

"Sleep it off," Fish says. "See how you feel when you come down."

Jimmy shoots him an annoyed glance, but Fish is impervious as always. After a moment, he reconsiders. That Todd kid wanted him to wait it out too. Maybe he should give it another try. Stop chasing Johnny C's shadow down into the grave, take a break, eat some Tostitos. He hasn't actually eaten anything in close to a week now.

When he looks up, it's _Fish_ who is hesitating, all of a sudden. His mouth is a grim brown line.

"What?" Jimmy says.

"Can you go home?" Fish asks him, in such a loaded way that Jimmy has no idea what the fuck he means.

"I mean yeah," Jimmy says, "it's about the only place I _can_ go?"

Fish nods slowly. "Alright," he says.

But Jimmy is already thinking ahead to tomorrow, to what he'll do if he can't go back _there_. What he needs to do is just take it easy, ride out the whole cursed day, wake up on Wednesday the Second and… and…

Deep down he knows the reason he keeps going back is because at least this way he's sure to get another try. If he doesn't make the cut today, the next time he gets cut the effects may be permanent.

"Can I use the back room for a minute?"

Fish wrinkles his nose. "Don't steal anything," he says. "That shit comes out of my paycheck." But he walks over to the old door and opens it for Jimmy, revealing the dim stock room. There's a wooden plank over the back exit, like something from a movie. The back windows are so frosted they barely let in the daylight at all.

Jimmy turns the knife over in his hand. "Thanks," he says, feeling inadequate and vulnerable, with his salt-dried eyes and blood-streaked clothing.

Fish shrugs, hand on the doorknob. "Hey," he says, "what are friends for."

Jimmy stares at the door for a long time, uncomprehending, long after Fish has closed it and returned to his post.

Then he considers his knife.

There has got to be an easier way to do this.

[CLICK]

The hard part is _not_ thinking about Johnny.

The city is full of things that remind him of Johnny—every alley way, every sneering face glimpsed between passing faces—and now that he's told himself he _won't_ go back all he really wants to do is go anyway.

Johnny's heartbeat against his shoulder, Johnny's ribs against his back… he longs for even the pain of that closeness, of that tenderness…

Dozens and dozens of crows follow him with their liquid black eyes as he steps out into the August morning, dust-yellow and creaking-dry. They watch him all the way down the road.

Jimmy tries to keep away from alleys and underpasses, from cafes and clubs. The day drags on, listless. Jimmy goes to see a movie. It's just another _Unlive Fast_, but this one's got the guy from _Pulp Friction_ in it, and he liked that one when he saw it last year. He comes out of the theater, sucking the straw of his soda, and steps onto the crosswalk—

[CLICK]

Jimmy blinks up at the ceiling of his bedroom, flabbergasted. Who had the god damn _nerve_—

Something thumps downstairs.

Okay, okay. Forget it. He'll avoid the theater just to be sure, he'll mess around somewhere else instead. He hasn't been to the arcade in a while. What possible kind of trouble could find him in an arcade?

[CLICK]

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous.

Jimmy sits up in bed, rubbing the spot on his forehead that still throbs slightly with the impact of the crazed pinball that cracked his skull open. There's got to be _somewhere_ he can wait in safety. Although when he reaches back through his memory, he finds precious little safety in any of its nooks and chambers. Safety is a sharpened blade, a mechanism of retaliation.

He's pulling on a shirt—BAND LOGO across the front—as the record store swims up to the surface of his mind like a body bobbing to the surface of a retention pond. His mouth twitches. Fish in the doorway—Fish crouched on the floor, reaching out to touch him—

The heart that has been stitched back and reconstituted some dozen times now gives a weak, anxious throb. He pulls on a belt. The record store seems safe enough.

Fish looks up at him as he comes through the door, his usual greeting on his lips, but Jimmy beats him to it.

"You got your collection here still?" he says. "You didn't take it home did you?"

Fish gives him a wary look. "It's here. Why."

"Hustle out the shoplifter," Jimmy says, pointing towards the man in the unseasonable jacket trying to shove a record under his shirt. "Let's play some of it."

Fish purses his lips for a moment and then twists back to shout over his shoulder, "Hey you! If you want that, you better have _money."_

The record clatters against the counter as the man in the jacket throws his hands up in surprise. A CD case falls out after it. Fish turns his attention back, elbow on the counter, and says, "Now, run that by me again."

Jimmy flips off the shoplifter and sticks out his tongue, as the man retreats. "You got some vinyl in there, right?" Jimmy nods towards the old school record player displayed between the aisles. "So play us something."

"I'm _working_, Jimmy. What exactly are you asking me for?"

Jimmy glances from the locked door of the stockroom to the shape of Fish's fingers against the counter top, brown against orange and pink ticket stubs. The bell jingles as the shoplifter scuttles out in disgrace. Jimmy picks at one of the stubs sliding out from under the glass.

"Are we friends?" he asks.

Fish slowly blinks red-lidded eyes at him. "Well we aren't _enemies_."

Jimmy pulls back. Something crackles unpleasantly through his chest. "Yeah," he says, "right."

Fish puffs out a sigh, ruffling the strands of his long Mohawk. "No offense, but you don't seem like the type of guy who has friends."

"Well why should I?" Jimmy says, his heel sliding back over the tile as he retreats. "Who needs them? I don't need anyone—I don't _want_ anyone, especially you, like it even _matters—_"

Fish just watches him sputter with heavy lidded eyes, like Jimmy is the spectacle of a predictable day time soap opera. Eventually, he holds up a hand.

"Do you even know the first thing about me?" Fish asks. His hand drops back to the counter.

It's Jimmy's turn to be stumped. "Is this is a trick question?"

"Do you know what movies I'm into? My favorite band? Where I go when I'm not working? You've never asked me a single question about myself as long you've been coming here. Do you even know my real name?"

"Is it… Fish… erton?" Jimmy answers weakly.

Fish stares hard at him, and then his lip twitches. He drops his face into his hand and turns his head, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.

Jimmy gives him a confused and hesitant smile, rubbing his thumb nervously over his hot palm.

"Fuck," Fish breathes into his palm, "I really don't know what to do with you."

He lifts his head at last, fingers curling away from his mouth. "Half the time you're falling over yourself to prove how mean you are, and the other half of the time you're climbing over the counter like a sad puppy."

"I _am_ mean," Jimmy says, curling his lip.

Fish's smile fades. "Yeah," he says. "You are."

He straightens up and walks away from the counter, with only a small jerk of the head to indicate Jimmy should follow. As Jimmy trails after, he opens up the stock room and kneels over a cardboard box by the entrance. Grey dust presses circles into the knees of his patched pants, the rips more from genuine use than artistic damage.

"Here," he says, and holds out a record. "Put that on the player, but don't turn it on. I don't trust you with my vinyl."

Jimmy glares at him but takes it anyhow. A few minutes later, Fish has the needle the way he wants it, and the room fills with the scratch-scuff of an old record coming to life. It has a strange ghostly quality, fuzzed with age, crackled and thin and mournful.

Jimmy sniffs the air, almost smelling the sound of it. "You like the blues?" he says.

"Robert Johnson," Fish says, presumably by way of explanation. He steps back from the table, satisfied. "They say he did a deal with the devil to make it big. In the end he was so good they wanted to play him at the grand ole opry, but when they sent a man down to Mississippi to get him, they heard the poor bastard was already dead."

Jimmy eyes the record table. The scratch and whine of the old record is climbing his back, raising the hairs on his neck.

"The days keep on worrying me," Fish hums along, underneath the mourning of the long-dead bluesman. "There's a Hellhound on my trail…"

Jimmy's eyes flicker to the window. _Hellhound_, the record echoes,_ on my trail…_

Fish settles back against the heft of a shelf. "Come on," he says, "grab a seat somewhere."

After a moment, Jimmy hops up on the counter. The heels of his boots swing back, brushing wood.

"My actual name is Xue Chivkeeb Yarlikchi," Fish says. He's watching Jimmy intently, so intently that Jimmy feels too nervous to make the joke that pops into his head automatically.

"Er," Jimmy says.

Fish waves a hand. "It's a mouthful. I'm aware. My mother got to pick out the first names, but the surname is my father's, of course. If they seem like they don't go together, it's because they don't."

"Why, um," Jimmy says, "why _Fish_?"

Fish hunches his shoulders. "_Your name's too complicated_," he says, mimicking someone Jimmy's never met. "_Why don't you pick an easier name, like John, or Steve._ Well if they want easy, easy is what they _get_. A good, solid English word. If you can't pronounce Fish, you're hopeless."

The record spins, pouring its reedy omen across the stacks, _the leaves are trembling on the tree, trembling on the tree…_

"That's the thing about people," Fish says. "They don't care about you, really. They just care about what they can get out of you. It takes too much effort to learn somebody's name. It takes too much effort to take an interest, not when they can just shake you down to get what they're after. Half the people who talk to me just want access to my record collection, and ever since I started working here, the other half is angling for discounts."

Jimmy feels a pang of an ache that isn't quite his own, like the reverb off a plucked string.

"I know why you come here and talk to me," Fish says, a bitter curl to his lips. "You're sad and pissed off and I'm a target that will stand still for you while you bleed on me. And I don't mind most days. Even bad company is better than no company."

Jimmy's mouth is dry. He doesn't know what to say. All this time he's thought of himself as a pinball bouncing into dumb obstructions, unseen except in the moment of collision, barely noticed even in the moment of retribution. It never occurred to him that someone else was watching _him_, even as he was drifting through their lives in a haze of unexamined impulse.

"I'm telling you this," Fish says, "because I think we _could_ be friends, maybe. I like you. When you're not being a dick, you're almost good company."

Jimmy nearly trembles, nails scraping against the glass of the counter. He feels small again—again, again, _again_—pinned and peeled as surely as if under Johnny's knife. He never stopped to think that while he was seething under the world's blind cruelty, only a counter away—

The door crashes into the storefront with a strident chime and the protest of glass, as Jimmy and Fish both startle. The shoplifter with the unseasonable jacket is in the doorway, panting, and for the first time Jimmy recognizes him.

"...From the convenience store," Jimmy mutters, not really to anyone but himself. "But that was…"

The man lifts his gun, familiar and fatal, with a shaking hand.

"…later in the day," Jimmy finishes.

"You know what I just realized?" the man says, wild eyes rolling, "_You've_ got money."

When did the world get so _dangerous? _This must be what it feels like to be one of the normals that he and Johnny stalk. Except they never do seem to be afraid, do they? No matter how many you kill, they never learn their lesson.

The barrel of the gun swings wildly from Fish to Jimmy and back, uncertain who or what to fire on. Jimmy grimaces. Fish is swaying, swearing under his breath like a kind of chant, all of his background paranoia spiking into one moment of sheer petrified terror.

"_I knew it!"_ Fish says, as the man in the jacket bears down on them, "god I _knew_ it, I saw them on the street and they _saw _me see them, oh god-"

"Shh shsh," Jimmy hisses, trying to stop up the flow of hysterics as the man in the jacket stumbles closer and closer, his already unhinged disposition growing wilder and wilder with each high note Fish's voice hits. He grabs Fish by the shoulders and tries to force him still.

"You'd better give him the money," Jimmy says. "I've just got to get through the next twelve hours and I'm home free, I can't afford to get shot again."

"_Again_?" Fish says, his voice cracking.

"Yeah, and it wasn't fun the first two times," Jimmy says. "Shit, three? Has it been three times? I'm losing count…"

"You've been shot _three times_?" Fish says, his voice pitching up into something that could shatter glassware.

"Stop freaking out," Jimmy hisses, "you're gonna make things worse."

But Fish is too busy coming apart to listen.

"_Money_!" the man howls, finger jittering on the trigger.

"Look I will _get _you the damn money," Jimmy tells him, "just put th—"

The shot goes off without warning or will, and Fish slumps in Jimmy's grip. Jimmy stares. The blood makes a dark wet tie-dye on the olive colored fabric of Fish's shirt. The boy's shoulders slip through his grip.

"Oh _shit_," Jimmy sighs. He brings up his fingertips to knead his forehead, slightly slick with sweat and now blood. "You just had to fucking do it, didn't you."

The man turns his shaking gun on Jimmy, looking more afraid of the thing in his hands than anything else now. Afraid, but too deep to give it up now. Jimmy looks down. Jimmy looks up. It just had to be now, didn't it?

"Alright," he says, wretchedly. "You better get me too."

The shot rings in his already blown eardrums. It punches him in the lung—even if he couldn't see the entry wound, he's learned what his lung feels like when something tears it open—and the bullet rips through the other side, shattering ribs.

Jimmy hits the ground in a pool of widening blood, fingers clamping automatically over the wound. The wound in Fish's chest is right over the heart, blooming with a bloodstain sticky-shiny at the center. Behind him, the record keeps spinning.

_I went down to the crossroads-_

_fell down on my knees-_

[CLICK]

For twenty or thirty minutes, Jimmy just lays there in bed. Nowhere seems to be safe anymore, not even places he's been a thousand times, corner stores and record shops. He feels hunted, something he hasn't felt since he was thirteen and hiding in a bathroom stall from the sound of sneakers in the hall.

So distant, and yet so fresh. Ruler-marks and wet hair, asthma and bruises. How many times had he thought about doing something to himself _worth crying about_, because none of this was apparently enough but he still felt soda-shaken, ready to pop. The fifth grade storage closet they dragged him out of; mentos and coke.

White trash Eureeds, ten years old and skinny as a rail, swallowing the sound of his own breathing as the laughter broke across him like the cackling of scavenger birds. That's what it felt like to be _hunted_, the meat between the mandibles, the bones between the teeth. Maybe if they'd been out to do something _truly_ awful to him, someone would have cared. But who gives a shit about a ten year old getting waterboarded in a public school toilet? You take your lumps and you say _thank you_ for them, because your mother raised you right, she didn't raise a whiner or a weakling either, Jimmy Eureeds.

The day that he picked up his first weapon, the hilt in his hand as warm and reassuring as the embrace of a parent, he'd stopped being afraid the world. He'd walked its glittering alleys confident in the knowledge that nothing else walked there more awful than him.

He is small again now. He is excruciatingly aware of the thinness of his skin, the delicacy of his joints.

The fish tank burbles at him, blue and florescent and rippled with the graceful swish of black tail fins.

He's not going back outside today. The moment he thinks it, he knows it's right. He's not going back out there. He's gonna stay right here in his little storage closet and wait for the world to forget about him, because that's the last thing he knows how to do. He gets up. He feeds the fish. He pokes at his bookshelf, not quite able to bring himself to sit down for any amount of time.

Reduced to the absolute bottom of the barrel, Jimmy cleans his room. The more things he moves, the more bewildered he is by how much _stuff_ he owns. It's not like he has a lot of money, how did he accumulate all this junk? But here's the jacket he found at the bottom of that mosh pit in ninth grade, and there's the remote control car that his dad bought him for Christmas when he was ten, and this is the math binder he couldn't find for nine weeks and eventually gave up looking for when the report cards went out with his big glowing D Minus stamped hard against the page. God he'd got his ass whipped for that one.

One thing he can say for himself, he's usually a good student. Partly out of fear for the consequences otherwise, and partly because he's always had _questions. _He used to read slowly but relentlessly, back when he was a prey animal, a pair of skinny wrists in a dark broom closet. He always had questions, and at least books didn't snap closed on your fingers when you tried to puzzle out the answers.

At the bottom of a toy box he hasn't touched since he was in middle school, he finds the dry corpse of a snow globe. Without glass and glitter and the heft of water, it reminds him of nothing more than a skeleton. He runs his fingers over the neon plastic, the starburst sign of a city he's never visited, and then packs it away again.

The day drags by. He can't stop thinking about the past, and it's making him stir crazy. In the middle of piling all his loose jackets up into a cardboard box, he has to stop and drag his nails at his own shoulders, trying to claw out the loathing that swells up inside him when he remembers the whimpering thing in the broom closet. No wonder his mother hadn't stuck around, with an embarrassment like that clinging to her ankles.

By the time the sun sets, he's hungry enough to brave the wreckage of the downstairs. He comes down the stairs warily, hunched and ready, but this time nothing shatters over his head. He picks his way across the house and shoves the kitchen counters clean. There's some ramen left in the box.

As the stovetop fires on, he hears a heavy rustle from the dark hallway. He freezes.

The creaking of the old floorboards grows heavier. The windows are dark through the curtains, unopened in a decade, and the only light in the kitchen is the tiny blue flame of the stovetop. His father lumbers past the piles of garbage, one huge shadow among shadows.

"So you're just gonna use up all the ramen without saying anything about it," James Sr. grumbles, his meaty hand reaching for the box in the cabinet that is clearly _not _empty, to anyone using their eyes.

"There's another one right _there,_ Jesus fuck," Jimmy says, even as he presses himself back up against the oven door.

"But you couldn't be bothered to fix something for your old man, huh," James Sr. says, casting the packet back into the box irritably. "I work all day and I come home to this bullshit, this shit hole house with nothing to eat—"

"You didn't even work today!" Jimmy says. "You were at the bar, I can smell it from here!"

"I'm entitled to unwind a little," James Sr. growls. "The pressure I'm under, keeping a roof over your ungrateful head—"

"You always _say_ that," Jimmy grits out. "It's your roof too! What would you do if I wasn't here, sleep on the _streets?"_

The water is boiling, and in the time it takes Jimmy to rip open the ramen package, his father is bearing down across the floor. Jimmy fumbles the wrapper and scatters twists of broken noodles in surprise.

"Pick that up!" his father says, as his footsteps slam against the floorboards. "You're a fucking animal, I thought faggots were supposed to be _clean_."

Jimmy clenches his fist, but he doesn't bend down. It's not as much a fully realized thought as an instinct born of seventeen years experience—he's not about to show the back of his neck to a hostile. "Oh, _I'm _the animal?"

"Pick that up!" his father roars, slamming a palm against the cabinet with a ringing _crack._ "I swear to Christ if you don't get your act together I'm gonna—"

"You're gonna _what!_" Jimmy says, "You're gonna throw me out? I'd like to see your sorry ass hold this place together without me, you can't even buy your own groceries!"

"I shouldn't have to! Your good for nothing mother should be doing it, but all I've got is her good for nothing son!"

"You just wait until Johnny takes me out of here," Jimmy snarls. "You're gonna be sorry when you're all on your own, you pathetic old bastard, you mean son of a bitch—"

"I didn't have to keep you!" his father roars, and his huge palm cracks flat against Jimmy's chest, shoving him hard back into the edge of the stove. "When Brandy left, I coulda split, I coulda put you up to foster! It's too much to ask a man, running a house, raising a kid, it ain't right!"

Jimmy's back hurts where the stove edge caught him, the kind of pain that makes you clench your teeth against the ache. He doesn't say anything, because he knows it's true. His father didn't _have_ to keep him.

"And then when I found you with that Carter boy," his father plows on, getting louder and louder, "you think anyone else woulda kept you? You think Willy Jackson woulda kept _his _boy?"

"You always say that!" Jimmy shouts, "You always _always_ say that, so why don't you just do it! Why don't you just do it and stop acting like you're some kind of saint, like if you just keep me here long enough it's gonna make mom come back-!"

The blow makes his head spin. His vision goes watery and jumbled, his ears ring—he rolls from the blow and hits the refrigerator head first, a cold solid monolith in the drunken jumble of his vision.

"-brat, you-"

Jimmy clutches the edge of the fridge, stunned. There's a _woosh_ and a confusing beam of light, and he realizes he's accidentally pulled the fridge door open as he tries to pull himself upright.

"-get _up!_ You little pussy, get _up_, I'll give you something to really-"

He hit me, Jimmy thinks, dumbly. He actually did it. After all this time, I didn't think he'd really—

A hand snatches him up by the shirt collar, stitches popping and breaking under the strain. Jimmy looks up woozily into the face of his father, the busted blood vessels and sagging jowls, closer than he's seen the old man in probably months, and Jimmy is still trying to wrap his head around _he hit me_. A shove here or there, a beer can sure, an empty bottle even, yeah, he has a scar from one of those actually, but those weren't _personal_ those were just—those were just accidents, accidents of being between his father and the wrong wall. A hazard of living in a wrecking zone. They were spill over, _splash_ over, they weren't _this._

"Dad," he says, "_Dad_-"

The air is growing acrid with smoke, and what _is_ that, is that the ramen? Is he burning the ramen? He pulls against his father's grip, twisting for the stovetop, straining against his father's red fist. The ramen, he's got to get the ramen off the burner, it smells _awful_ and he can't stand it, he—

"Stay still you pussy piece of shit!"

James Sr. throws his son down. The open refrigerator door cracks the back of the falling skull, it rings through Jimmy like a church bell, it tears through him like the spike of an iceberg, and then the smoke and the blue flame and the greasy yellow light of the open fridge all are swallowed by the sound of a neat, small

[CLICK]

** -x-**

On the mantel when he was a child, there had been a snow globe that was just above his reach, no matter how he stretched his fingers. Occasionally his mother would pick it up and shake it with one hand, as if she was preparing a martini, before setting it back down and regarding it with an expression beyond his limited child's understanding. Inside the drifting glitter, in plastic and neon, it had been the starburst of the Las Vegas sign against a slot machine, proud with the holy insignia of the triple sevens across its display.

"Does it snow in Lavegis?" he asked his mother, one day, while she tried to fix her hair in the mirror above the couch.

"Las Vegas, baby," his mother replied, threading her fingers through her straw-like bangs.

Jimmy licked his teeth, several of which were missing. He was at that age. "Las va-gis," he tried. "It snows?"

"It's a desert, baby." His mother blew out an irritated breath and brushed her bangs back into place. "It doesn't even rain there."

"I know what a desert is," Jimmy insisted. He was sitting in the chair by the door wasn't he? Back then he'd been able to fit in that chair with his knees pulled up to his chin, the whole of him on one cushion. "We just did jograffy with Ms. Neal, we did deserts and rain forests and, and, volcanos…"

"That's nice, baby." She'd never been a beautiful woman, but there was something about her that you couldn't look away from. She was burning with a different kind of energy, restless and prideful. He remembers her always with her racecar-red nails and blue eye shadow.

"Are you gunna take me to Las Vagis?" he asked her.

"You bet on it," she said. "Once you're old enough, baby. We'll have a big time, won't we?"

She turned from the mirror, and she flipped the full wattage of her killer smile on him. It was a smile that could stop men in their tracks, and frequently did. She came across the room, fishing her keys out of her purse, and paused in front of his chair. He remembers there was something about her skin, something rough and patterned, like permanent sun damage. Her arms had been lean and hard, just like the rest of her.

"My little lucky charm," she said, ruffling his hair. "Give mommy a kiss for good luck, kiddo."

He remembers the nicotine smell of her clothing, the stale smoke smell. He always held on too long—she disentangled him from her middle, impatient, as he desperately tried to burrow into her nonexistent softness.

"Now if your daddy asks where I am," she said, "what do we tell him?"

"You went to Aunt Tia's house to help her clean up because her husband is a no good so and so," recited Jimmy.

"That's right, baby, good job." His mother paused for a moment to adjust the cleavage of her shirt, tugging the zipper a little lower between her breasts. "Dinner's in the fridge. Be good."

The globe swirled on the mantle, full of golden sand, glittering lukewarm snow. One day he'd found all at once that he was tall enough to reach the fishbowl glass, and on that day he'd learned that glitter wasn't nearly as nice on the floor, and neither was the naked inside of a snow globe stripped of its snow.

In a room somewhere in the world, unremarkable by any assessment, Jimmy touches his sore jaw. The phantom pain of dislocation is already fading into another background ache in an already battered body. The digital clock flashes the hour at him, unheeded.

Jimmy goes about his morning routine in a daze, pouring half the fish food onto the counter before he notices what he's doing. All his posters seem to regard him with reproachful pity as he passes them by.

On a morbid whim, he pulls back the heavy curtain of his window to find the withered gum tree in the yard heavy with crows, all of their black eyes fixed on him. He jerks the curtains closed and stumbles backward, trash crunching under his heels.

"Shit," he says, clutching the bedpost with one white hand.

Down below him, the distant heavy creak of his father's footsteps fill him with a fear he's never felt before, a bubbling terror that will tear him apart if he lets it come to a head. His father. His own father. He knows his father, he knows the man is mean to the bone but he's not a _killer_, he would never—he would never—

A sour expression twists Jimmy's mouth.

-He'd never risk the possibility that someday Brandy Eureeds would come back for her son. They'd both of them, Sr. and Jr., kept themselves struggling on in the wretched hope for half a decade now. They'd eaten it like bread and water, barely subsisting, holding it together for one more day.

Jimmy doesn't dare go downstairs. He pulls on a shirt and pants and tries not to shake. He shrugs on the jacket that he only ever grabs when he's aware that he may need to spend the night in a doorway somewhere, because it rolls up into a pretty decent pillow. In the mirror he looks pale even for a Scots-Irish Goth. He's got to get out of here, he can't he can't he can't

The curtains come back open and it's all he can do not to make eye contact with the swarm of crows in the gum tree as he unlatches the windowpanes. He hooks a leg over the sill and swallows thickly, eyeing the ground below. He can lower himself and try not to land on his wrists, that's about all he can do, and it doesn't escape him that under the circumstances this is nearly suicidal, given that he's been killed by a fucking _pinball_ already, but anything is better than waiting around in that house for—

He hits the ground, shoulder and knee and it hurts, it hits him like a cement wall, but nothing breaks. He lies in the dirt for a moment, just breathing, high with the sheer relief of not being dead. When he finally drags himself up onto his feet, it _does _ache something fierce. Jimmy looks up, a hand steadying himself against the wall, with his right knee throbbing too hard to take any more pressure.

Countless wings break the air, flapping and swallowing the light.

There are so many jagged black shapes against the yellow morning, against the twisted spindles of the old tree, that in places he can't tell where the edges of one bird become the mass of another. Their voices caw and cackle like laughter in the dry throat of a corpse. There are so _many_ of them.

"Eheh," Jimmy giggles, even as a chill races up his spine, "what's that… a mass murder?"

They take wing. Jimmy shrinks back from the noise of it, the sudden whirl of motion. It's not—there's something wrong with it, with the way it comes together, more like liquid than living creatures, like droplets of ink pooling together—

On the yellow grass, the murder touches down in one smooth black streak. From the gale of wingbeats a woman unfolds, stark and pale, billowing, the toe of her slipper sliding over the grass. Her outstretching fingers aren't just white as bone, they _are_ bone.

"_There _you are," she says, in a voice like a crow's laughter, like a corpse's rattling lament. Her mouth is the jaw of a skull, the lipless grinning smile; her eyes are hollow sockets. And then he's not so sure, because maybe they _aren't_. Maybe those are just dark and heavy lidded eyes; maybe those are just such white teeth, such pale lips, and after all, if he was looking at bones, wouldn't he _know_ it?

The thump of Jimmy's heart is hot and wet in his chest, he can feel the blood pounding through him. The rough edge of the house scratches his fingertips.

She's dressed as black as a crow's wing, with the same shifting oily rainbow underneath, her long skirts sweeping the grass. There's a veil—a collar—it's a nun, he realizes, although it's not the kind of sexy nun he's used to seeing in B horror movies and bad porno. Her shape is the shape of something medieval, something reverend.

"What a mess you've gotten into," she says, arms outstretched for him like an expectant relative. "You're absolutely _mired_ in it, my child."

What _is_ she? How did she _do_ that? He's reluctant to admit it, but there's always the possibility that he's completely lost his fucking mind somewhere in the process of being repeatedly massacred. Every fiber of his body screams at him to get away from here, to run as hard as a he can for as long as he can, to break open the plastic picketing and scramble under the crawl space and bury himself in the dirt under the rusted tricycle where she can't reach him.

"The fuck are you?" he says, as the edge of the house presses hard into his back. What is he _seeing_ here?

"Just call me Mother Superior, my darling," she says. "Mother, if you're feeling frisky."

Jimmy tightens his jaw. Whoever this broad is, she's not showing any signs of backing off. He runs his hands over his pockets as subtly as he can, feeling for a knife that he hopes will be there. Of all the mornings not to armor up. He left the whole damn case upstairs. If only he hadn't been in such a hurry to get out the window.

"Do I _know_ you?" he demands. Nothing _here_ either…

"Of course you do," she says. "You're my little helper, aren't you? My precocious little monster. And you've been making trouble for me, haven't you now?"

This close, he can make out the shape of the embroidery on her chest, which is a skeleton key with human molars for tines. The twisty flourishes of the handle are embedded with three opening eyes. He can't shake the feeling that they're watching him, the black thread pupils following him as he shrinks back.

"Lady," he starts to say, but she cuts him off.

"Mother, _please_," she says. Her lips are chapped, pale with dead skin. When she smiles, she shows so many hard white teeth. "Let's not stand on formality, not you and _I."_

The pain in his knee feels real. The scratch of the cement under his hand feels real. This conversation _doesn't_. She's awful chummy for someone who-if she even _exists-_who shouldn't know his ass from adam. In his experience, people who act real friendly for no reason are always after something.

"What do you want?" he asks her, hoping against hope that she's just some escapee from the mental hospital looking to bum spare change for bus fare.

"I want you to come with me," she says, sinking _that_ rickety ship. "You've been running for long enough, my darling. It's time to go with grace."

Jimmy licks his lip. "Actually, I've got," he says, "I've got places to be, see? Uh. People to visit. Thanks for the invite, whoever you are—"

"Jimmy," she says, still smiling, but her voice strikes as hard and sharp as a stone knife. "How many times have you died now?"

His heart trembles like a winter leaf. "I," Jimmy says, "I—lost count—"

"Nineteen times," she says. "Nineteen last breaths. Nineteen final heartbeats."

Behind her smile, the inside of her mouth is a lightless void, a pit without flesh or limit.

"It's sweet that you think you can outrun me," she says, and now she's so close, she's close enough that he can see the way her skin is shrink wrapped over her knuckles, the fleshless cling of it. "But I've been hunting since your ancestors were pawing at the mud for worms, my darling. Wherever you go, you go under the shade of my wing."

She smells the way that funereal flowers smell, when they've been sprayed so that they all smell the same, so that you can't smell the corpse underneath them all. She gently tugs the seam of his t-shirt, smoothing out a wrinkle from the fall. He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets, pulling back, shoulders hunching.

"I was born when there was only the light," she says, "and the darkness, and the deep, and El who moved over the face of it. Only elements that time could not wear were born before me. I am inescapable. I am insatiable."

Fuck, _there_ it is. Jimmy closes his fist over the weight in his pocket. "You're _death?"_

"How many gifts have you laid on my doorstep, my child? Don't you know the face of the one you serve?"

Jimmy looks up, before he can stop himself. It's stupid, he tells himself— even if she _was_ the grim reaper or whatever, how should he be able to tell? But under her translucent skin there are no veins, only the shadow-like bruises where the bones of her skull recede into themselves. Her eyes—he's seen eyes like that before, in the moments before steel met meat. They are merciless eyes, even as they soften with affection, even as they regard him with fondness. He has seen them in the barrel of a gun, in the sheen of a knife.

Jimmy is not a great believer in things, but he believes in _that._

"Give up the chase now," Mother Superior tells him. "You've had a good run. You and I are old friends, aren't we? My disciple, my darling, my _protégé._ I'll carry you gently."

"But I—" Jimmy swallows, dry mouthed. "But I'm not done, I haven't got him to listen yet! I can't go! I'm so close, I'm—I just need one more try, I can do it if I just have one more try!"

"You're already dead, my child. Everything else is as good as a dying dream, a phantasm of escape."

Jimmy stiffens. "That's bullshit," he says. "I'm alive! Right now I'm alive! And as long as I'm alive, I still have another chance."

"You are only a corpse in slow motion. The bullet has already split your heart—it's only your brain that doesn't yet know it's dead."

Her knotted fingers lift and brush his hair, ruffling the uncombed mess. A chill ripples through him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. It's a feeling like someone walking over his grave, and he wants to pull away, his whole body is trying to flinch away, except… except…

Except something deep inside him is trying to push up into that icy touch, into that soft dry voice.

"Living dead boy," she says, "it's time for you to come with Mother."

His eyelids are heavy, growing heavier as they drift close. "You really... recognize me?"

"Of course I do," she says. Her sharp fingertips stroke his cheek. "When you were spitting blood in an alley with your first kill at your feet, I was with you. When you stalked the dark with your fathomless rage, I was with you. I am always with you. Everywhere you go, you have gone under the shade of my wing. Let me take you home, now. My sweet child, my disciple, let me take you home."

Blissful coolness sweeps his feverish skin. The august sunlight drips from his body and leaves him only the reassuring chill of the deep earth, an endless bed calling him back to sleep, back to rest, into the waiting arms that curl even now around him. A homecoming, at last. The hard and lean arms, at last.

"Relax... it doesn't have to be painful..."

Jimmy's eyes snap open.

"Wait a second," he says, and snatches her wrist still in mid-stroke. "You _need_ me to agree to this, don't you?"

Mother Superior says nothing. Her black eyes glitter; she tilts her head.

"You do!"

Jimmy throws her hand off and scrambles away, the back of his shirt catching on the rough wall siding. Mother Superior watches him go, as unblinking and intent as a snake tracking a rat through the underbrush.

"You can't just snatch me up or you _would_," Jimmy says. His bare feet skate over the dirt as he reaches blindly behind him, feeling his way around shriveled hedges. "You're as stumped by this looping thing as I am! I don't think I _am_ dead, right now! I think—I think if I turn around right now and go—"

Something shifts in the fall of her black clothes, the weight of the long veil.

"I think you can't stop me!"

He has just long enough to realize he's made a mistake before she's a streak across the grass, her dress flaring like a murder of wings, her endless teeth rolling back to show the yawning void like the heart of a collapsed star, a darkness that roars its hunger into the primordial night. Jimmy slams against the dirt, every atom in him recoiling from her touch as she bears down on him, cracking open the dry earth under the combined force of their fall.

"_Foolish child_," says her tongueless void of a mouth, clicking teeth, laughing mandibles. "_Playing with mother's jewelry, dressed in mother's shoes—do you think you also invented executions?"_

Her ivory fingertips flash in the sunlight. Her elbow is an arrow tip against the sky as she reels back, a scorpion's tail, she takes aim—

And then the wicked head of Jimmy's switchblade plunges into her chest.

The darkness blows out of her like ribbons torn away in a gale, whipping human hair and mouths unrolling endlessly, lion's teeth and iron breastplates, a swarm of insects, and Jimmy grits his teeth against the explosion. His cheek hits the dirt; his eyes squeeze tight.

Silence snaps closed over the cacophony. Jimmy cracks one eye open, in the ringing quiet. His searching gaze meets only the sun-seared sky, empty and unobstructed.

With shaking hands, he lowers his knife to his chest. The hilt settles between his ribs, slightly hot to the touch.

"...Okay," he says to the listless sky, tasting dirt and lawn clippings. "What now?"

**-x-**

"You know what, fuck this?" Jimmy says, marching through the door to the CD Cesspool.

It's the same as it always is—dusty and unwelcoming, empty except for the orange jacket that burns in Jimmy's vision like a red cape in front of a bull.

Fish looks up, eyes wide. "Careful," he says, "there's—"

"I know, there's spooks, I get it. Tell you what, anybody who wants to fuck with you today can go through me," Jimmy says, and marches straight past the counter into the stacks.

The shoplifter drops what he's holding when he sees Jimmy bearing down on him, and he fucking _ought_ to because right now he's fifty pounds of terror-rage in a ten ounce jar, and he's ready to lash out at the next person who so much as looks at him sideways. He lunges, catches Jacket by the throat, and thrusts a hand into the guy's pocket. The guy scrambles at his hands, too slow, as Jimmy draws and cocks the handgun that has murdered him twice now. It feels _good_ in his hands. It feels like a cool wash under a blistering summer heat.

"I want you to know," Jimmy says, down the sights of the gun, "that I am armed, and I am having a _really_ bad day, and the only thing stopping me from blowing your brains out right now is that I'm not sure if I'm going to wake up tomorrow or not."

The guy's eyes go crossed staring down the barrel of his own gun. "T-take it easy man," he says, "it was just some vinyl?"

"Get out," Jimmy says. His teeth lock together, grinding the crowns.

"Can I just—"

"No!" Jimmy shouts. "Get out _now!"_

He stands there, shaking, as the sound of sneakers pounding the floor gives way to the panicked clang of the doorbells. His fingers tremble on the black metal. It's a glock, he realizes with the part of his brain that's still functioning. There's no safety on a glock. You just squeeze hard enough, and the chamber goes _boom_.

Fuck, there's really no art to that, but god damn if it doesn't make him feel a little safer anyway. Even the shame that twists through that thought isn't enough to make him let go of it.

From somewhere behind him, he hears Fish like he's speaking through water. Heh. Water. That's funny, he should remember that for later. He hears comedy is a good way to warm people up.

"Jimmy, say something, come on man—"

Jimmy turns. Fish immediately scrambles back, and Jimmy frowns for a moment, hurt, before it slowly dawns on him that he's still holding the gun in front of himself.

"Oh," he says, "shit, let me just," and starts to put the thing down on the nearest stack, only, his hands won't quite… release….

"Jimmy," Fish says, "you gotta let go of it."

Jimmy watches his hands like they belong to someone else, someone who is shaking and pale and standing three feet to the left of wherever _he_ currently is. "I don't like being unarmed," he hears himself say.

"Okay… but maybe you can be like… slightly _less_ armed?"

Eventually Jimmy remembers that he's still got the switchblade in his pocket, and relaxes enough to allow Fish to pry the live handgun out of his grip like a bomb disposal squad on a thirty second count down. His hand is warm—he lets it rest on Jimmy's wrist for a beat longer than he has to, almost like a reassurance. Or possibly because he's worried Jimmy will change his mind at the last second and lunge for the weapon.

"Chivkeeb," Jimmy's mouth tells him. That's interesting, he doesn't remember authorizing that comment.

"Sorry, what?" Fish says.

Jimmy shakes it off with a full body shudder, feeling cold and disoriented. "What's Chivkeeb mean? That's one of your names, right?"

"Uh," Fish says, "yeah, but how do you—"

"I dunno," Jimmy says, "I asked around."

The look on Fish's face is so raw and astounded that Jimmy almost kind of feels guilty about pretending. He sinks back against a shelf and watches Fish stow the gun away in the register, underneath the money. There's something mechanical about the way Fish is moving—abruptly, Jimmy wonders if Fish is experiencing the same bewildered post-panic fugue.

"It means Genesis," Fish says, "more or less. I think my mom wanted me to be a fresh start. I guess the thing about fresh starts is they don't necessarily end up any better than your first try did, 'cause you're still the same person, at the end of the day."

Jimmy screws up his mouth. "Maybe that's true for _some _people."

"Yeah?" Fish shoots him a skeptical look and locks the register. "If _you_ haven't changed and the _world_ hasn't changed, how does doing the same thing over and over again amount to anything? That's the definition of insanity, man."

A thrum of dread pulses through Jimmy's gut. "Maybe you just need to—to understand the situation better. Maybe the world doesn't _have_ to change, if you just understand it better."

Fish eyes him. "Could be," he says. "But I think a change in perspective that radical would have change the person in turn, don't you?"

Jimmy doesn't know how to respond to that. Instead he turns over his hands, looking at the lines of his palms for possibly the first time in his life, surprising himself with how many small wrinkles there are, all around the deep creases. Which one is the laughter line?

"Man, something's up with you," Fish says. "If you'd been approached by the men in black, you'd _tell_ me wouldn't you?"

"The who?" Jimmy asks, but only half listening.

Fish sighs. "Okay," he says, "pack it in. We're going."

Jimmy looks up. "Going?"

But Fish is already up at the front, pulling down the blinds. He flips the sign in the window and unpins his nametag. "I just had to confiscate a gun from a customer. I'm seventeen, man. If Rob expects me to finish a shift after something like that, he can find a new cashier, 'cause I quit."

"…You're kinda sensitive about guns, aren't you?"

Fish twists and gives him a _look. _"As opposed to what? In_sane?_"

Jimmy scrunches up his face and tries to count how many times he's faced down a live gun now. Should he be proud? "Just seem kinda touchy is all."

"Both sides of my family got run out of the home country by thugs with machine guns," Fish says. "I'm not keen on being the next generation to get that treatment. Come on, I'm not locking you in here. Get up."

Jimmy gets up. He's feeling more solid now, more stable, but the uncomfortable side effect of that is that he's also feeling exhausted and, honestly? A little nauseous. Fish gives him a thorough once-over as he shuffles across the floor, the store key dangling from his fingers. It flashes in the light, a blue comet streaking through the dust and the darkness.

"Come on," Fish says. "You're fucking crazy, but I'll buy you a drink anyhow."

It's barely noon, and neither of them is even old enough to buy smokes at the corner store, so when Fish says _drink_ Jimmy isn't surprised to find that he means a coffee. They sit in the window of the smoky little café wedged between the used book store and the Greyhound and they watch the vagrants rolling in and out of the station, with their worldly possessions loaded in careworn backpacks and heavy shopping bags. Jimmy doesn't really like black coffee, but for fear of looking like a pussy he leaves it dark and piles it up with sugar when he thinks Fish isn't looking.

"So this guy," Fish says, "he's the one who gave you those scars?"

Jimmy coughs sugary black sludge back into his "save the whales" mug, eyes watering. "What?" he manages.

"You're covered in scars," Fish says. "I'm actually not sure how I never noticed it before. The lighting in the shop must be shittier than I thought."

They've been talking about—well, _Jimmy's_ been talking about Johnny, again, this time with a kind of frenetic compulsion that just seems to get worse the longer he talks. Fish has mostly just been listening. Grimly.

"It's either this guy or your parents," Fish goes on. "They look like they're all about the same age, though, which makes me think it's someone relatively new in your life. But they all look _old_, so—I'm not actually sure."

"Johnny would—Johnny would _never!"_

"Yeah?" Fish sets his cheek on his fist. "Cause the way you talk about him, I dunno. You're obviously head over heels, and I don't think anyone with eyes could miss that. Which makes me wonder what he's getting out of stringing you along."

"He's not doing it because he _likes_ it," Jimmy protests. "I just keep doing things wrong is all."

Fish narrows his eyes.

"I mean," Jimmy says, rushing to course-correct, "it's not going to last forever, not once I get it right! Then we'll be fine! Everything will be fine!"

"Jimmy," Fish says, and reaches out to tap the curve of Jimmy's neck with his finger. "This one looks like it should have _killed_ you."

Jimmy finds his mouth is awfully dry. He swallows down a deep draught of coffee to wash away the feeling.

Fish's hand retreats. "Look," he says, "maybe it's none of my business. You say he's some kind of teacher of yours, and I don't know what the gelatinous fuck that means, to be honest, but if you don't wanna tell me about it I guess you don't have to. Even if it's fucking, I don't know, Kendo, or Fight Club, I still think you oughta be careful with anyone who willingly inflicts _that_ kind of damage on you."

"Maybe I deserve it," Jimmy says.

In the tabletop, someone a long time ago carved a bleeding heart with penknife-strokes that countless pairs of hands over the years have worn smooth and dark.

"I've done some bad shit," Jimmy says. "I know I have. I can't fucking tell what I deserve anymore, honestly. I just wish he'd stop deciding—"

_Whether I live or die,_ comes to rest on the tip of his tongue. But he knows he can't say _that_.

"—I just wish he'd stop," Jimmy ends, lamely.

"I doubt you've done anything bad enough to deserve all that," Fish says. His mouth is a grim line, over the rim of his coffee cup. "Trust me, Jimmy. I know a couple things about deserving and not deserving. No matter what they tell you, it's not about _you_. It's always about _them_. Misery loves company."

Jimmy looks at Fish out the corner of his eye. Jimmy hasn't had a whole lot of tender or meaningful conversations in his life, but there's something about the way Fish is glaring into the middle distance that makes him want to ask if _Fish_ is okay, actually.

He rips off a steadying bite of his bagel. It's dryer than—fuck, that's—

Jimmy coughs. Or, at least, Jimmy tries to cough. The chunk of bagel stuck in his throat is kind of making it hard to do _anything_. His skin starts to go hot as his automatic bodily panic response kicks in, but the only noise he can make is a kind of shrill choking noise.

Fish notices. Fish _also_ panics.

Jimmy has an entire fucking lovely minute to contemplate how much he wishes that _anyone_ in this café had ever taken a course on the Heimlich maneuver, including himself, before his vision starts to bubble black and abruptly cuts out.

Suffocating to death? Is actually not a super fun way to go.

He does feel a little bad about the look of abject horror on Fish's face.

[CLICK]

"Well that was stupid," Jimmy says, to the poster on the ceiling. Sexy Frankenstein Girl keeps her opinions to herself. Reluctantly, Jimmy gets up and greets the day.

The routine sooths him, a little. He feels calm enough to leave the house through the door this time, although if he comes down the stairs at a full tilt run that's nobody's business but his own. He's calm enough, also, to take the gun from the shoplifter without his spirit literally trying to eject itself from his body. He pockets it, this time, and offers to walk Fish across the road to the café for a while. Fish takes the offer gratefully, much more shaken this time than the last time.

Jimmy wonders why that is. The only difference is that Jimmy himself didn't lose his mind and have a shit fit in the middle of it. Fish wasn't in any more danger this time than before. It's a stumper.

While Fish settles his unsteady hands around the weight of the coffee mug, Jimmy considers whether he wants to pick up this conversation where the last one left off. Thing is—and call him crazy if you want—he's got this feeling that if he launches into that shit out of nowhere, Fish is gonna spook for real. He's already having trouble with knowing more than he ought to. No, what he needs to do is wait this one out.

Jimmy sips on his drink. There's creamer in it this time. He's pretty sure Fish isn't in any state to notice. He sits there for a long time while Fish works on his breathing, tongue-tied. He tries out several conversational openers in his head and discards them uneasily. This is by far the most forethought he has _ever_ put into speaking, and it's immediately stressing him the hell out.

How do people _live _like this? Constantly thinking about what they say before they say it? Holy shit he'd rather die. He could talk about himself, that's his usual default? But it—well it just seems kind of—wrong?

"What do you like to do?" Jimmy bursts out.

Fish startles, like he forgot Jimmy was there. "Do?"

"I mean like—" Jimmy presses his knuckles to his forehead, grimacing into the middle distance. "What do you do for fun? When you're not working. What do you like to do?"

Fish stares at him. "I like Shakespeare," Fish says, and then seems to realize what he's said, stiffening with red-faced regret. He looks mortified.

Wow, that was—that was not what Jimmy expected. What with the Mohawk and the patches and all, he was kind of expecting to get some guff about going to shows. "Um," Jimmy says. "Cool?"

"They put on Shakespeare in the park every spring," Fish says, in a rush, as if he's lost control of his mouth, "I got my first speaking part this year because I told them I was eighteen when I auditioned. I've been doing set management since I was fourteen."

"Oh." Jimmy blinks. He tries to imagine Fish on a stage, and weirdly enough, it kind of works. "Who'd they cast you as?"

There's a moment of hesitation, and then something bright and fierce breaks over Fish's expression. Jimmy is taken aback with the sincerity of it. People don't usually smile around him unless he's about to be the butt of the joke.

"Mercutio," Fish says. The way he says it, Jimmy can hear him tasting it in his mouth.

"Oh!" Jimmy says. "From_ Romeo and Juliet_. The one with the—" he mimes being stabbed in the gut, gagging theatrically.

Fish lets out a burst of laughter, slapping the tabletop. "Yeah! _Not so deep as a well, nor as wide as a church door. _That's the one!" He's still grinning as he takes a sip of his drink. "Good memory."

"I liked him," Jimmy says, with a fuzzy recollection of ninth grade language arts. "I think. I mean, I get it. Sometimes you just gotta get stabbed."

"I guess sometimes you do," Fish replies, in a voice that tells Jimmy he thinks they're joking around.

Something fragile and warm is happening in Jimmy's heart, and it terrifies him, and it makes him ache for more. For all that Jimmy has known him since the summer started, and for all the attempts he's taken at this day, he's never seen Fish look like this. In the store, the time with the blues record, Fish seemed so… bitter. This is so different, like a whole other person. It's like it unlocks something in Jimmy that his body doesn't know what to do with. He doesn't know whether it should make him happy or sad. Whether it should make him cry, maybe.

He looks down at his coffee. "I wish I could talk like this with Johnny," he says. The admission hurts him somehow, like extracting a splinter from flesh.

Fish tilts his head, still smiling. "Who's that? Do I know him?"

Jimmy hesitates. He's explained this so many times, but somehow he never feels like he's gotten it right. He really doesn't want a repeat of his last attempt, which made him feel deeply unsettled and more than a little stressed.

"He's…" Jimmy starts, "he's just this… really cool guy… I thought I knew him but I guess I don't really know him as well as I thought I did, or it wouldn't be such a disaster every time I try to introduce myself. I've tried so many times, but I never get it _right_."

"You're kind of an acquired taste," Fish says, quirking the corner of his lips. "You come on a little strong."

Jimmy wrinkles his nose.

"If I don't make a strong enough pitch, how's he gonna know we're destined for each other?"

Fish gives him a look, the look Jimmy has come to recognize as the patented Fish brand of "hey, wait a second, we've got a ping on the radar here boys."

"What do you... like... about him?" Fish asks, which is something he's asked before. Only the fact that Jimmy has had practice answering this question stops him from spewing words like a blown dam. Only the fact that he's tired down to his bones, and bruised, and growing gun-shy.

"Everything," Jimmy sighs, and then amends, "except for his tendency to go for the jugular, maybe."

Fish considers this for a moment. Jimmy eyes his companion's bagel with a certain amount of hunger, but doesn't dare tempt fate twice. He sticks to drinking his pale coffee.

"What does he like about you?" Fish says.

Jimmy works his jaw. He _should_ be able to answer this. There are several things that Jimmy excels at, assets that he can bring to the table, skills that he's worked his ass off at mastering. He should be able to list in alphabetical order the things the two of them have in common, the selling points of his resume, the essence of The Pitch. The thing is, he_ knows_ that isn't working. He's got a body full of scars to prove it.

"Apparently nothing," Jimmy says, grimacing into his coffee.

"Tough sell," Fish says. "You said you've been trying to introduce yourself?" He leans back and gives Jimmy a thoughtful once-over, chewing absently at a thumb nail. "Maybe you're coming at it from the wrong direction."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Well," Fish says, "what does Johnny like?"

Jimmy opens his mouth. He closes his mouth. He knows all _kinds_ of things that Johnny hates, but actually, he's not sure what Johnny _does_ like. It never seemed that important. His art is driven by rage and resentment; it's the wellspring of hate given fine, fleeting life.

"Um," Jimmy says. "Freezie drinks?"

Fish sighs. "I bet you haven't even asked him a single question about himself, huh?"

Jimmy's face heats up. "Well I—it's not like I don't know _anything_, I followed him, I mean, I've been watching—"

Fish makes an expression half pleading and half nauseous. "Dude. That's creepy. You know that's creepy right?"

Jimmy thinks he preferred it when Fish was being overprotective and uncomfortably sympathetic about the scars. His ears are absolutely burning under this scrutiny. "It's easier to know people from a distance," he mumbles. "Before they have a chance to decide they don't like you. When you try to talk to them, it all goes wrong."

Fish makes a noncommittal noise. It's weird, being judged by someone you actually like. Somehow it hurts more, but there's nothing you can _do_ about it. Because you like them. You can't just reach your hand down their throat and rip out their trachea. Because you _like_ them.

"Here's a tip about people," Fish says, leaning in conspiratorially. "People love to talk about themselves. Everyone wants attention. Give a little—" he taps his mug against Jimmy's with a clink, "-get a little."

Jimmy finishes his coffee silently, chewing on that. The café smells of fresh grind and cigarette smoke, of the old paper on the book shelf. It's almost entirely populated by Stephen King novels. He eyes the cover of _Carrie_, which stares back at him with its expressionless alien gaze. _This_ conversation seems to be going well, anyway. He wonders...

"Do you, um, d'you wanna tell me more about Mercutio?" he asks.

The look on Fish's face is enough to make even the embarrassment worth it.

**-x-**

After Fish returns to the record store with his heart safely tucked back under his sleeve, Jimmy takes the bus to the edge of town. Every day of this unending day, the sun has taken the same path over the sky, through the clear stratosphere, seeking the rooftops of the city. It's a thing you can't look directly at, something you can only track out the corner of your eye, marking its progress by the places it doesn't occupy. Jimmy was always the kind of kid to stare straight into the heart of the sun, eyes watering, purely for the sake of doing something he'd been forbidden to do.

He stops at the edge of the neighborhood, pulling the emergency stop before they can get any deeper in. He unloads, just his case and his too-hot-for-the-season jacket, and the glock in his pocket. There's this annoying flicker of white at the edge of his vision, and he keeps rubbing his eyes trying to get it to stop. Maybe he really _shouldn't_ stare at the sun like that.

The convenience store sits sullenly on the corner, parking lot empty except for a man selling fruit out the back of his truck. Jimmy trades him what little change is left from the coffee shop in exchange for a handful of ugly looking strawberries. They all look like the teeth of some freakish mutant, but they taste alright, and Jimmy eats them raw in the shade of the store while the sluggish traffic comes and goes.

What is he doing?

There's dirt grit in the skin of these strawberries, but he doesn't have the money to buy a water bottle just to wash them off. He grimaces and licks sand out of his teeth.

What _is_ he doing here? Looking for Johnny, obviously, no prize for guessing that one. He's hardwired into it at this point, he doesn't know if he really _can_ stay away, in the infinite long term. But why is he _here?_

As far as he can tell, he's not safe anywhere. Not at home, not in the city, not with Johnny, and not even alone. His best bet is probably to stick to places he's familiar with, places he's already died, and try not to let the same thing kill him twice. And if the Reverend Mother comes after him again… Christ, he's not sure. At least he's got a gun.

He killed her once. Or, well, you probably can't _kill_ Death, but he can do whatever the hell it was that he did before. He wonders why that worked. He wondered why she seemed as surprised as him that it _did_ work. He spits sand on the sidewalk and eats another strawberry.

She can't _really_ be death, can she? The black robes and the skull face are about right, he guesses, but… She's not what he expected. Her rattling dry voice reminds him of a smoker's cough. He thinks of the glitter in a snow globe, of fire-engine-red fingernails against clear glass.

Over the course of the next couple hours, Jimmy avoids one skidding runaway car, another choking fit, and having the fruit stand collapse on him.

The moment he sees Johnny step down onto the concrete, his whole body goes hot and cold. He feels like he's caught in a snowstorm, instantaneously transported to the tipping point moment that the ice starts to burn. Johnny passes him without noticing him, hands in pockets, wrapped up in some thought that twists his mouth into a distant frown.

Jimmy tightens his hands on his knees. He feels some kind of way, but it's not easy to tell exactly what that is anymore. The doorbell clinks behind him, a burst of cool air escaping into the afternoon.

After a moment, Jimmy gathers up his things. He shrugs on the jacket that he only ever grabs when he's aware that he may need to spend the night in a doorway somewhere, because it rolls up into a pretty decent pillow, and picks up his case.

He pushes into the store, into the chill stale-smelling air, just in time to hear the cashier mumble: "Do you want a bag for that?"

Johnny looks the same as he always does. It's funny, before this endless day, Jimmy didn't really know _what_ he looked like. Didn't know about the dark circles or the knife-edge cheekbones, the roundness of the jaw. Now, looking at him is almost like heating up the kiln again, returning to a half-finished project.

The doorbell chimes behind him, and a shock of cold dread shoots through Jimmy as a couple of rough looking fucks come muscling past him. One of them slams his shoulder with the flat of their hand. He stumbles, hip cracking against the knickknack display, and a tumble of tiny glittering cityscapes shatter across the floor.

No way. He took the gun. He _has_ the gun. The grip is hot under his fingers, the hard metal nestling into his palm.

The cashier whips up with a glare. "No rough housing," he says.

The goon in the beanie lifts a gun. It's not the same as the one in Jimmy's pocket, it's got a wooden grip, and it occurs to Jimmy for the first time that they were probably going to do this _regardless_ of whether he was present or not. It's probably the _record store_ that's the glitch in the pattern of the day. So what happens—these two are already planning their dumbass heist, Jacket gets worked up when Fish calls him out for shoplifting, he flies off the handle and then doesn't stop flying—?

"We want money!" Jacket douche shouts. "Money now!"

The edge of Jimmy's knife case hits Jacket with a crack like stone shattering, probably on account of his ten pound Cro-Magnon skull. He wobbles for a second, blinking in a concussed daze, and then topples sideways like a tree coming down. Beanie douche looks down at him for a second, uncomprehending, and then up at Jimmy. His nervous eyes flick to the door.

"No," Jimmy says, "_stay_ there. I wanna use your body like a pincushion."

Beanie bolts. Jimmy wrinkles his nose at the retreating form, the bell on the door chiming after him. "Chickenshit," he says.

When he turns back to the room, he finds himself pinned under the inspection of two glinting black eyes. There is a long straw-slurping sound.

"I think I owe you some measure of gratitude," Johnny says. "I've already been shot once in the last twenty-four hours, and I wouldn't like to go through the whole process again."

Oh. _Oh. _Jimmy's body is a June sky popping and fizzling with the light of rockets. He feels faint. "It wasn't any trouble," he says, barely able to hear himself over the sound of fireworks.

"Well! That's good to hear," Johnny says, and then turns away, apparently taking that as the end of the conversation.

Rushing to catch up, Jimmy jumps over the body on the floor and skids up to Johnny, heels squeaking on the linoleum. Johnny scoots back from him, careful not to become the stable object Jimmy steadies his wobbling balance on.

"Can I," Jimmy says, "walk you to your car or something?"

The light from the freezie machine paints pink and blue over Johnny's cheek bone, fever dream colors, while the neon fake freezie cup slowly spins.

"…If you really want to," Johnny says, after a moment of wary consideration. "I suppose."

"_Fuck _yeah."

Jimmy trots past him, rushing ahead to get the door. He thinks he detects a certain flicker of approval in Johnny's expression, as Jimmy holds it open for him. The fruit vendor is long gone now, and in the parking lot the low sun is throwing shadows over the asphalt. The ugly muscle car idling in front of the doors almost certainly belongs to the would-be robbers.

"So you live around here?" Jimmy asks, because that seems like something a normal person would ask in this situation.

Johnny makes a vague affirmative noise. His car is parked half up on the grass at the edge of the lot, as if he only has a vague understanding of how parking lots are supposed to work. As they cross the lot, Jimmy screws up his expression in sudden thought.

"Hey," he says, "did you say you've already been shot today?"

"Yep," Johnny says.

"You wouldn't happen to be trapped in the looping cycle of a single day simultaneously unable to die and unable to avoid being killed, would you?"

Johnny gives him an interested look. "No," he says. "Not that I know of."

Jimmy doesn't know whether to be disappointed or relieved. If it was both of them, at least they'd be in this together.

"I tried to kill myself sometime last night," Johnny says, almost _brightly_. "Either I succeeded or I failed, but either way, here I am after all, so the point is probably moot."

He tried to—he tried to _what?_

"Shit," Jimmy says, swallowing down a knot of guilt and horror. "_Shit_. I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Well, how could you?" Johnny says, very reasonably. "It's alright, I try this on a pretty regular basis. Three AM really gets to you, after a while. I don't think I'll be doing it again, though. I didn't really enjoy the experience."

The thought is crashing through Jimmy's brain like a car through a storefront. Despite Johnny's casual upbeat attitude about it now, he must have been really _low_ to want that. It's hard to imagine how low he would have to feel, except… except it's not, exactly, because Jimmy has seen his face in the moment of so many excruciating "mercy" kills—he's seen Johnny looking down at him like his face was a mirror that reflected back an awful truth, he has watched the mallet come down, he has tasted his own teeth—

"What, um…"

"Bullet," Johnny says, and taps his forehead with one gloved finger. There's a tiny scar there, the same kind of pale perfect scar that marks Jimmy's throat. "I laid on the floor for so long just bleeding. You shouldn't bleed like that with a bullet to the skull, but I did. I could taste my own brain matter in the back of my throat and I still didn't die… and then, the footsteps…"

"Whose?"

Johnny settles back onto the hood of his car, toying with the straw of his drink. "Just some guests," he says. "Doesn't matter. One of them stomped me pretty good, but I don't think that was what killed me either. I remember the void… the starless darkness… the endless night…"

He's looking up at the clear August sky, past it, into something only he can see.

Several tries ago, Jimmy had an eager romantic thought about becoming for Johnny all that Johnny's art and passion and mayhem had been for himself. Now the totality of what that means strikes him to the gut like a carving knife. Doesn't what Johnny does save him the way it saved Jimmy? Why else would he _do_ it?

"Are you happy?" he asks, with a half-numb mouth. "The way you live, does it make you happy?"

Johnny actually laughs. He tips his head back and laughs like Jimmy's told the funniest joke he's heard in ages. His shirt sags as he settles back down, flashing the stark divots of his collarbone.

"Happiness," Johnny breathes, "haha, _happiness_. What's a moment of happiness to a lifetime of misery? Scavengers, all of us, snuffling for bites of happiness in the dirt like pigs. The memory of a good moment doesn't inoculate you against the pain of tomorrow, does it?"

Jimmy just stands there, at a loss for words. It's not that he's never thought those kinds of things before, but only ever at his lowest. It's like watching himself at rock bottom, before the triumphant slash of blood in the alley ways, before the specter of Johnny took him and steadied him and lifted his head to see the stars again.

"Take apart the universe atom by atom," Johnny says. "You won't find a single ounce of mercy in it. If my suffering ever relents, it won't be because someone else took pity on me. In that sense, we're all as helpless in the winds of the cosmos as any microbe suckered to the ass of a fish in the ocean."

Jimmy rocks on his heels uneasily.

"If anything!" Johnny says, getting more animated now, "If anything, the memory of happiness makes suffering _more_ unbearable. The endless quest for a shot of pleasure to dull the ache only exacerbates the problem! Forget the lot of it! Scrape me clean of longing and desire and dissatisfaction, remove the infection of _want_ from my flesh! Without happiness there can be no unhappiness! Without hope there will be no hopelessness! Let me live in darkness like the creatures that crawl through the caverns beneath the earth, unaware of the sun, blissfully blind to the warmth of the fickle daylight."

"Nirvana," Jimmy says.

Johnny pauses, an emphatic fist suspended in the air. He turns his attention back on Jimmy like a targeting computer selecting a new mark. "Come again?"

"You sound like you're describing Nirvana," Jimmy says. "The Buddhist thing. You know. The, um, end of wanting is the end of suffering."

"Oh," Johnny says. He blinks. "Yes, I suppose."

Jimmy scuffs the concrete with the toe of his boot. "I never got any of it," he says, brows creasing deeply. "What's the point of living without wanting things? Sometimes… sometimes wanting things was the only thing that kept me going."

"The more you want, the more you feel." Johnny waves him off, dismissive. "Feeling is a prison. I desire only freedom, at last, at whatever cost. True freedom—" he closes his fist, "—perfect freedom."

"But what do you want to _do_ with your freedom?"

Johnny opens his mouth. He huffs out a perplexed breath.

There's something really endearing about the wrinkle of confusion in Johnny's forehead. It's so strange seeing him like this, talking to him like this. It's also _surprisingly_ nice for Jimmy not to have a knife shoved somewhere in his anatomy by this point in the conversation.

And that's when he sees the flicker again. It's an instinct in his gut that has him reaching into his pocket before he even really has time to think about what he's seen reflected in the glass of the windshield. He whirls, glock in hand, to find nothing. No one.

"What's that?" Johnny says. And then, with obvious distaste, "Is that a gun?"

It's just the road and the heavy trucks coming down it, unpeopled, unremarkable. Reluctantly, Jimmy pulls his hand back, disengaging.

"Sorry," he starts to say, "I thought I saw some—"

One of the heavy trucks squeals and twists, tires burning rubber tracks into the pavement; the load of pipes shudders and snaps its restraints, scattering rust-colored iron in a lightless meteor shower across the highway and the shoulder of the road and one—the lone stray—slams through Jimmy's chest going sixty miles per hour and tears out his spine with a spew of blood and matter.

He blacks out. When consciousness flickers back into place, he's dragged himself off the other end of the pipe and he's lying on the concrete in a puddle of blood.

There's a pair of boots in his line of sight. He watches as Johnny crouches down beside him, looking vaguely concerned.

"Wow," Johnny says. "What are the chances?"

He actually can't feel the worst of it. That would be the missing spine, he figures.

"Better odds than you'd think," he mumbles.

Johnny's gloved fingers hover over the gaping wound in Jimmy's chest. "It'll take you a little while to die like this," he says. "Do you want me to do something about it?"

Knowing Johnny, there's only one thing that can mean. He's made the same offer before, although in strikingly different circumstances. His vague concern, dim regret, those things are new.

Jimmy licks the blood flecking his lips. It hurts, but he's used to hurting now. He's ninety percent hurt, ten percent stitches. He can handle this. A little bit longer, and then he'll start over. A little bit longer.

"No," he croaks. "I could—use the break."

[CLICK]

This time, between the coffee shop where he lets Fish chatter on for a while about Shakespeare ("No, man, there's a _rhythm_ to it, it's _poetry_,") and the convenience store, Jimmy stops to collect some money from a friend. Or at least, Jimmy calls him friend for the duration of the exchange. It's a lot easier to get your money out of a tightwad with a gun in your hand. It doesn't matter, he figures—the day will just reset anyway.

The robbery goes about the same. Johnny accepts his offer of an escort, and doesn't seem surprised when Jimmy spends several seconds outside the 7/Eleven trying to judge where that falling pipe will land.

"The last time I repeated this day," Jimmy mumbles, not paying much attention to himself as he tries to chart an angle of entry that will carry a length of metal through his abdomen, "I ended up down _here_… which means I was standing _here_…"

Johnny watches him like a vaguely interesting rerun, sucking on his freezie. "You repeated a day?"

"I'm stuck in a time loop," Jimmy says, from the ground. He squints one eye at the highway. The truck was swinging around when it came free…

"Like that movie about the asshole journalist?"

"What?" Jimmy says. He looks up. "No. Maybe? I dunno. I only watch good movies."

Once he's satisfied that he knows the best way to keep the car between himself and the road, he takes a seat next to Johnny on the hood of the old car, causing the suspension to groan. The sun is setting again, and he's glad to have a second look at it, to have a second try at this conversation. He asks about Nirvana. Johnny is more than pleased to repeat himself, and Jimmy listens with his brows furrowed, trying and failing to understand.

Wanting is all he _has_, in this life. He is a patchwork of hunger and ambition knotted together with hope, like a kindergartener's twine-and-punch-hole handbound book.

"For a while now I've been living in the hope of seeing someone," Jimmy says, scratching at a spot of rust with his nail. "I want to tell them how much they mean to me. I want them to see what I've become, you know? I want them to be—" he swallows. "To be proud of me."

"External validation is as addictive as heroin, and as corrosive."

Jimmy winces. "Okay, well, I dunno about _that, _but," he says, "the point is. Trying to get to that point is costing me a lot, and mostly it's painful, but there are still—there are still _bright_ spots, you know? That's what living is."

"Living is dreadful," Johnny says. "So's dying."

Jimmy snickers. "You've only got the two options, you know that, right?"

Low in the sky, the sun is a red copper ball between the spires of downtown. Jimmy amends his earlier thoughts about it, as he watches the light glitter off faraway glass. When it's low in the sky like that, it's almost bearable. You could just about reach out for it.

"I've never seen a sunset," he remarks. And then, realizing how stupid that sounds, he blushes and hunches into himself. "Today," he clarifies. "I've never seen one today. I never make it to sunset."

"Oh," Johnny says, "because of the time loop. That's sad. They're very pretty, if you like that sort of thing."

"Uhh-" Frankly he wasn't expecting Johnny to believe him about the time stuff. Even Fish had sounded like he was mostly humoring the product of a bad trip, and he's the most credulous person Jimmy's ever met.

Johnny frames the sky in the brittle edges of his fingers. "I like the color it turns," he says, "when it's low like that. It's almost a kind of saturated amber. Almost a darkness of light. You'd be hard pressed to recreate that on paper."

Jimmy stops watching the sunset and starts watching Johnny. In the flare of red light, he is a strange and alien thing with his knife-edges and delicate hollows.

"What else do you like?" Jimmy asks.

Johnny lets out a soft hum. "Cherry candy. Cross-eyed lizards. The moment before a stoplight turns green, but you can see the other side of the intersection already turned red. Debussy."

"Yeah?" Jimmy leans out of the shadow of a far away building and into the light. "What else?"

"The stars," Johnny sighs. "Driving at night with the headlights turned off. A good movie. Dancing."

Jimmy hiccups a laugh. "You don't _dance_."

Johnny scrunches up his face. "Don't I? I have this memory, the sound of this band… streetlights… we went around and around, we were laughing… beignets? I think I remember beignets. They're little powdery things right?"

"I… dunno," Jimmy says, taken aback. "Maybe?"

"We had beignets," Johnny says. "I had powdered sugar on my jacket. There was water on the street, you could see the lights reflecting…"

With his faraway eyes, Johnny stares into the evening, fingers steepling in front of his mouth. "One good night," he says, distantly. "One last, good night."

Here's what Jimmy knows. The summer is hot, the winter is cold, and Johnny C. is the most beautiful man he has ever seen. It's not the face Jimmy would have made for him, one long long day ago, built from shadows and hope and half-seen smiles in dark alleyways. But it's _Johnny's_ face, moved by the delicate and inscrutable machinery of Johnny's being. And it's beautiful.

"Let's have another good night," he says, before he can think twice about it. "You and me. Let's do something fun."

The trance that holds Johnny breaks, and he cocks his head at Jimmy. "Fun?" Johnny echoes, as if it's the tune of a song he hasn't heard in a very long time.

"Sure," Jimmy says, "let's—" he catches himself just in time, remembering the dozen times that bringing murder into the conversation has ruined everything he worked so hard for. "Let's find something like this," he says, and gestures to the low red sun. "Something worth seeing."

Johnny chews his lip. "I have a rather testy hallucination waiting for me back home; I really _shouldn't_ leave him alone for too long. Just look at what happened to the last set."

There's a squeal of rubber on asphalt; a red pipe sprouts from the wall of the convenience store with a brutal crack and twang of vibrating metal. Dust spouts from the wound. They both ignore it.

"I don't know what any of that means!" Jimmy says cheerfully, "But it sounds bad and lame and you should hang out with me instead, because I am going to stop at _nothing_ to make sure you have a nice night."

There's a soft look, a lost look. Johnny closes his arms around himself. "Why me? You just met me."

Jimmy takes a deep, sheepish breath and leans back. "Weeeeeell," he says. "From your perspective, yes, sure."

"Oh," Johnny says. He frowns. "Yes. The time loop. I see."

"You know, you're taking this science fiction high concept _a lot_ better than I thought you would."

"This morning I was shot in the head, died, and then came back to life before lunch time. Either I'm in no place to complain about the madness of the universe, or we're both insane, in which case I suppose we're at least in company."

"Great point, _well_ made," Jimmy says, jumping to his feet. "So let's hit the town, whaddaya say? Couple of undead psychos, hell and high water, I bet we can at least get a good burger out of the night."

Slowly, Johnny rises after him. He rustles for his keys, a jangle ending in a foam smiley face, and then looks up. "Are we friends?" he asks. The lost look is transforming into something almost… almost hopeful, if that's something Johnny knows how to feel. "In the other days, the ones I can't remember. Are we friends?"

The weight of two dozen deaths falls across Jimmy's back. He hesitates. He can feel the lines of scar tissues throughout his body burning, hot lines of guilt and loathing through his skin.

"No," he admits. "No, but—I think we could be. I think we deserve a chance to try."

**-x-**


End file.
